Hey all - I joined this forum just to possibly help anyone having problems with SAPPHIRE HD 3850 512MEG AGP card. I purchased the card and had massive poroblems at first. Everything from games not working to very poor FPS and game performance. My system is as follows: Win XP home SP3 - Intell P4 3.06 cpu - 2 gig pc3200 memory - Soyo Dragon sy-p4x400 ultra motherboard - standard 7200 rpm IDE hard disk drive - and of course the sapphire card. Nothing special. But here's what I finally figured out and I'm having good results ( thank god cause I was pulling my hair out ) - 1. - Purchase a GOOD power supply - I got the corsair TX650W, it's packing a +12v rail with 52A. enough to run the card. The card requires +12v rail with 30A. I didn't wanna mess around with combining multi 12v lines, I've heard mixed results. cost was about $130.00 2. - Downloaded and install latest Motherboard chipset drivers - Mine are VIA so I went to the website and got em. 3. - Install new beta Catalyst 8.6 control center and drivers - Uninstall the current drivers, reboot, and do a clean install. After installing 8.6 and rebooting, let system fully load then reboot again. I also ran disk cleanup and disk defrag after the last reboot, then reboot again for safe measure! - maybe extreme but hey it doesn't hurt. I hope this helps anyone thats fighting the same issues - I had a sapphire radeon X1600 512mg card previously and noticed a big difference after the proper install of the 3850 card.
