ATI Radeon 7000 VE on Dell PowerEdge 1800

The ATI Radeon 7000 VE on-board graphics adapter is correctly recognized
by Windows Server 2003, but not by Vista #5536. The Vista beta 2
software from ATI also fails to recognize the 7000 adapter. Does anyone
know of a Vista driver for the 7000 ?
Thank you.
Robert Robinson

 

AFAIK ATI never developed software drivesr to the 7XXX series that provided
DX9 support which is required for some Vista components so I suspect that
they will not develop any. Since I certainly don't think any 3rd party will
develop any it appears that you will need a new graphics card if you want to
install Vista.

 

Thank you for the reply.
The 7000 works fine with Windows 2003 Server, but is limited to
"Standard VGA" on Vista.
I think that you are correct. We will need a new graphics adapter. I
prefer nVidia to ATI based on past experiences with the drivers. The
7600 nVidia chip looks good on paper and GigaByte has a heat pipe based
board that uses this chip. It is stated to be "Vista ready", but no
drivers are apparently available at this time.
Robbie

 

I also support the 128MB 7600 GS as a an excellent card for video and it is
supported by the Current NVIDIA Vista driver 86.81.
See the attached link:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_31325.html

 

I ran into some very interesting problems trying to find a graphics card
for the PowerEdge 1800 that is compatible with the motherboard and has
drivers for Vista and Windows Server 2003. Unfortunately, the
motherboard has two PCI Express slots that are 8 lane size, but no 16
lane ones as is required by virtually all of the current graphics cards.
Matrox does market a 1 lane board, but there is no Vista driver.
There is a PCI-X slot, but there are no known PCI or PCI-X graphics
cards that have Vista drivers.
An solution to what appeared to be an impossible problem is to use a
Adex Electronics lane converter. We chose model PEXP16-SX-16/8 which
converts an 8 lane connector to a 16 lane connector. You can now use a
16 lane graphics card. The only catch is that the adapter adds 1.05
inches in height above that of the motherboard connector. There is
plenty of vertical clearance in the PowerEdge 1800 so that the added
height is not a problem.
We chose the Gigabyte GVNX76T256D-RH for the graphics adapter. It uses
the nVidia 7600GT chipset.
Robbie

 

I do not understand why there is no generic XGA driver in vista?

JMS