DL385 g4 slow screen

[Mark Potter_1]

I have a DL385G4 with a single AMD chip running Win2003 (i've tried both 32 and 64 bit), and the screen refresh is very slow. You can see the screen painting. Anybody had similiar or know what I'm doing wrong.

It was loaded with SmartStart 7.4 and has had the motherboard changed once.

[Terry Hutchings]

I believe I have read somewhere they had resolved video problems on this machine by upgrading the bios on the server.

[Mark Potter_1]

Terry,

Thanks for the quick response, the server has the latest bios but still has the same issue.

The problem i think is with the ATI driver. With win2k3 it runs the microsoft driver that comes with the os, but there isn't a HP badged driver anywhere that i can see.

I've only used Intel based DL servers before and one thing they do is slow their fans down once the management software has started. This box doesn't do that either. Any thoughts?

[Mike Percival_2]

Why look for an 'HP' badged driver?!! If it's an ATI based card, try the ATI web-site (www.atitech.com).

In my experience, manufacturer-provided drivers are almost without exception much better than generic drivers, especially Microsoft ones.

[Mark Potter_1]

Because there is no Win2003 driver from ati for the RAGE XL. I've tried shoehorning the XP driver on with a little improvement but not to what i would expect.

Functionally i don't think it will make a difference, processing seems ok, but if i have anything on the screen doing updates it is very slow.

[Mike Percival_2]

Do you have the latest version of DirectX? Just a thought because ATI Rage cards run like dogs without it under most MS OS's.

[Mark Potter_1]

i have everything off the update site, but i'll go to the direct tomorrow and see what happens.

Hadn't thought of that.

[Mark Potter_1]

Tried doing a directx update and still no joy.

[Basil Vizgin]

Which resolution and color depth you try to use?

[invisik]

I have this exact same problem. The ATI Rage XL driver from MS is the only thing out there and the screen update is very slow. I'm running with a HP TFT7600 1U rack monitor/keyboard. HP has a windows 2000 video driver but it will not load on 2003.

Help! Driving me crazy when viewing virtual machines through VMWare Console as it's extremely slow to refresh the screen.

Thanks.

-m