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  • Asus AH3650 & radeonhd

    Hi everybody, first post here. I wished to report my experience with the brand new card I popped inside my machine. The AH3650 is a passively cooled AGP version of the HD3650 and the first RV635 AGP based card on the market AFAIK so I feared it would be hard to make it work with radeonhd.

    As it turns out under version 1.2.1 (on Fedora 8 here) it works very well even though the driver doesn't recognize the card. Without hardware acceleration 2D performance is not exactly stellar but it does the job. The only really significant drawback which I hope will be fixed soon is that the card becomes very hot to the touch, probably because the radeonhd driver still doesn't support the clock-scaling features of the RV635.

    Anyway big kudos to the radeonhd developers for offering this free alternative, no way a binary blob is going to touch my distro

  • #2
    big kudos to you for reporting your findings here! Thanks.

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    • #3
      A small update. I'm now on Fedora 9 and the card works well with both the 'radeon' and 'radeonhd' drivers. 2D performance seems improved under both drivers but still very sluggish. Clock-scaling is also not supported yet, the 'radeon' driver recognizes correctly the DynamicClocks option but doesn't seem to do anything with it.

      On a side note for anybody with this card or planning to buy it, the passive cooler does its job fairly well however the thermal pad used on the GPU is of very poor quality, replacing it with some Arctic C?ramique thermal paste yielded a significant reduction in GPU temperatures. It is also possible to put heatsinks on the memory chips however they must not be taller than 10mm or they won't fit under the cooler. BTW the card overclocks very well, mine went from 725/1000 to 800/1300 which gave a healthy performance boost.

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      • #4
        i cant wait till there comes basic 2d, 3d and video acceleration. Lol, as soon as that hits the various mirrors, im gonna have to go out and get like ~20 of these cards, for various boxes around me

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        • #5
          The only really significant drawback which I hope will be fixed soon is that the card becomes very hot to the touch, probably because the radeonhd driver still doesn't support the clock-scaling features of the RV635.
          I also had this card for a little while. I would not recommend that anyone intending to run either the radeonhd or the fglrx drivers to get this card until the clock scaling is functional. I put a j-type thermal couple in the heatsink after I noticed how hot it was. It read 70C for a few hours, then i looked down a little later and it was at 110C. I freaked out and put a fan on it, which totally defeats the reason I purchased the card. I am running dual dvi monitors at 1920x1200 which may be stressing the card more then average. Under windows(which I installed only to flash my mboard bios) the card can run 3d perfectly without a fan.

          Good job ASUS on making a decent 3d card that is silent, Boo to fglrx for poor clock scaling support, and I am sorry to radeonhd for not having time to write clock scaling code for your wonderful open driver.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by trentgbs View Post
            I also had this card for a little while. I would not recommend that anyone intending to run either the radeonhd or the fglrx drivers to get this card until the clock scaling is functional. I put a j-type thermal couple in the heatsink after I noticed how hot it was. It read 70C for a few hours, then i looked down a little later and it was at 110C. I freaked out and put a fan on it, which totally defeats the reason I purchased the card. I am running dual dvi monitors at 1920x1200 which may be stressing the card more then average. Under windows(which I installed only to flash my mboard bios) the card can run 3d perfectly without a fan.
            That's surprising, under heavy load the GPU internal sensor never gave me temperatures above 67C with 25C room temperature and minimal case airflow (there's a single 120mm SilenX fan @1000rpm, CPU and PSU are both fanless). However as I said that's after I replaced the original thermal pad and replaced it with good paste; idle temperature went down 10C but I didn't bother to check for loaded temperatures before and after so that might be it.

            Another option for a passively cooled system could be picking Sapphire's version of the HD3650 and replacing the stock cooler with this one:



            The overall cost will be higher but performance should also be slightly better as memory on Sapphire's cards is clocked higher. Also AC's Accelero S1 is probably a much better cooler compared to the one which comes with the AH3650.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by crystall View Post
              A small update. I'm now on Fedora 9 and the card works well with both the 'radeon' and 'radeonhd' drivers. 2D performance seems improved under both drivers but still very sluggish. Clock-scaling is also not supported yet, the 'radeon' driver recognizes correctly the DynamicClocks option but doesn't seem to do anything with it.

              On a side note for anybody with this card or planning to buy it, the passive cooler does its job fairly well however the thermal pad used on the GPU is of very poor quality, replacing it with some Arctic C?ramique thermal paste yielded a significant reduction in GPU temperatures. It is also possible to put heatsinks on the memory chips however they must not be taller than 10mm or they won't fit under the cooler. BTW the card overclocks very well, mine went from 725/1000 to 800/1300 which gave a healthy performance boost.
              please ... i need help ... i bought yesterday an asus ah3650 and it has a problem with the drivers i don`t know what 2 do ...i tried everything ... "The file ati2dvag.dll is not digitally signed, which means that it has not been tested by Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL). You may be able to get a WHQL logo'd driver from the hardware manufacturer"

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              • #8
                Originally posted by nicu89 View Post
                "The file ati2dvag.dll is not digitally signed, which means that it has not been tested by Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL). You may be able to get a WHQL logo'd driver from the hardware manufacturer"
                FAIL!
                The forum's title reads: "Open-Source AMD/ATI Linux"

                Comment


                • #9
                  This sounds like a Windows driver and Windows OS. The message probably means that the board mfg either patched the driver after we gave it to them or shipped an engineering test driver for some reason. Either way, just download a fresh driver from amd.com.

                  This forum focuses on Linux and Solaris; try DriverHeaven for Windows driver discussions.
                  Test signature

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                    This sounds like a Windows driver and Windows OS. The message probably means that the board mfg either patched the driver after we gave it to them or shipped an engineering test driver for some reason. Either way, just download a fresh driver from amd.com.

                    This forum focuses on Linux and Solaris; try DriverHeaven for Windows driver discussions.
                    thanks ...i`ll try driverheaven... i can`t install drivers from amd.com.

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