Hi guys, Just built a gaming rig, installed the video card drivers and all, but the grafics suck for game play and vista is only rating it a "1.0"...its a Radeon x1650. Any ideas what could be causeing such horible grafics or is the card really a junky card? thanks Always back up...I JUST LOST 287 gigs entertainment!

There's quite a few flavors of that card, there's the DDR2 & DDR3 version, there's X1650 Vanilla, there's Pro & there's XT. Regardless, even the fastest flavor is not what I would equip a newly built "gaming" machine with. If you happen to have the lowest performing version of the card .... then there's your problem. So, what do you have & what games are you having problems with?

Even my laptop's GMA 950 scores a 3.0! If memory serves me well, that card should be at around 4.0. Stupid question, but after installing the drivers, did you refresh the score? It doesn't update by itself after installing new hardware/drivers.

ok, i'm stupid....YES I REFRESHED TEH SCORE lol....i forgot to install direct x, after in stalling that my comp now scores a 6 on video and the hd only scores 5.6 Always back up...I JUST LOST 287 gigs entertainment!

Vista by default comes with DX 10 & you shouldn't have needed to do anything on your part to fully implement it, I am also not even sure just how you installed it. Either way, the X1650 is a sub-par card for a gaming system with a quad-core CPU.

i dloded direct x from microsoft...idk why, but it made it work. Games run pretty good now even though thte cards not great. HL2, Call of duty, GTA san andrais , hl2 all run great...pluss video editing just got tons faster. It is a sub par card, and i plan on upgrading, but i ran out of money after getting the quad core, i figgured i could always upgrade the video later, and that card only cost me 90 bucks. Any recomendations of a gaming vid card <300 bucks? Always back up...I JUST LOST 287 gigs entertainment!

http://www.computing.net/windowsvis...