Ati Radeon 7200

[sinope]

My video card is an Ati radeon 7200 64mb sdr. Bios / Direct X show the card memory at 32mb.
- I've updated bios, direct x & drivers.
- Bios does not offer a way to increase the 32 to 64
- Ati knowledgebase hasn't helped
- Neither have emails to ati support

I'm out of ideas and looking for anyone's thoughts/input
------
PIII 1ghz
WinXpsp2
512ram

thanks if you can help
sinope

[Doug Nelson]

Are you having a problem with it? It sounds like more than enough for editing photos. If you're just looking to speed things up, I'd concentrate more updating your other hardware.

[Kraellin]

physically remove the card and look at it. somewhere on the card there shld either be a stamp or label which says what it really is. you may have 'thought' you were buying a 64 and got a 32. could have been a mistake in boxing, you reading things, or whatever.

if you can find nothing on the card itself, get the free version of 'Everest'. it's the best system information program i've ever found. you could also take a look at the windows 'sys info' under accessories, tools.

but generally speaking, if bios is reporting it at 32, then it's 32. are you sure you're reading the bios right and not the 'agp aperture'? the aperture is something completely different and related to physical ram, not vid cards.

Craig

[sinope]

I wasn't really having issues (and not too concerned) but I thought perhaps it may be something simple overlooked. I took Kraellins advice and physically looked at the card a second time. On the bottom side, in little itty bitty faded printing, are the words 'Radeon LE'. Don't ask me where I got the 7200 box sitting in my closet!! (I really need to clean out my closet and upgrade the puter)
Thank you both for the reply. Some amusing info I foud ...
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One of the most curious aspects of the Radeon LE is the dearth of information surrounding the card. Originally, there was no official information regarding the Radeon LE, which inevitably led to quite a bit of speculation. A quick phone call to ATI sorted out the problem, and put all the rumors to rest.

The Radeon LE card is not actually produced by ATI. When ATI found no space in their product line for a video card based off of Radeon cores that did not meet speed specification, they decided to sell these chips to a third party manufacturer who could do with them what they pleased. Althon Micro, the company that ended up with the non qualifying Radeon cores, decided to manufacture and sell video cards based on these chips and gave these cards the name Radeon LE.

ATI agreed to this arrangement, given one condition: that the Radeon LE cards would be sold in the Asian market only. Estimating a large demand for slightly slower and cheaper Radeon DDR cards in this market, ATI said that Althon Micro could sell Radeon LE cards at a lower clock speed than the Radeon DDR as long as ATI's powerful HyperZ technology was disabled on the card's BIOS. ATI figured that this would provide a card that would fit between the Radeon SDR and Radeon DDR in terms of performance and therefore would not encroach on their product line.

This is why the mysterious Radeon LE cards originally appeared only in Asia. Unfortunately for Althon Micro, it was not long before they realized that the demand for a card like the Radeon LE was much lower than expected in this part of the world. Facing financial difficulties, ATI agreed to allow the sale of Radeon LE cards to the rest of the world as long as they were sold only in OEM packages.

And that brings us to where we are today. The Radeon LE can be found in a variety of on-line retailers, however it will always come in a nondescript brown box without a manual and will never appear on store shelves.

[Kraellin]

well good. glad you got that cleared up.

Craig