What the heck is going on with Vista?

[bluesman737]

Hi

Until recently I had always built my PC's. That changed after I bought a laptop which fried and I got a store gift voucher off the insurance.

As you can imagine it was difficult to get what I wanted - had max £600 and the latops I was looking at were underspecced for the price. So went for a desktop. I am an old gamer - so looked for something powerful enough to do that. Ended up with an Core 2 duo E6400 and what Vista tells me is an Nvidia 7500LE.

The label on the carriage box confirms this as an Nvidia 7500LE with 512mb. However a sticker on the machine itself says ATI Express 200!!!!!

Lo and behold in the task bar ATI software is loaded, but when you look in control panel it confirms the graphics card as an Nvidia 7500LE (WMMD) and the driver as Nvidia. (What the bit in brackets after the card model number means I have no idea)

Unable to sort this out went onto the NVidia site and loaded their analysis tool. It confirmed it as an 7500LE with 128mb of memory. It also had an icon next to it to update the driver. When I pressed that it took me to the ATI website!!!!!!

Looking further through the Nvidia site it does not quote a 7500 series anywhere - it goes straight from 7300 to 7600.

Note I wanted to open the box to sort this out but was told I can't do that as my 12 month warranty would be broken.

So;

1 Does someone know what this card is - ATI, NVidia???

2 What the size of memory is, is it any good for games?

3 If it is an ATI card, is the 7500LE older than the 9600 pro?

4 Previously I had a P4 2400 with ATI Radeon 9600pro card... will the E6400/7500LE combo match/beat that?

5 Vista says the 7500LE is on a PCI slot - can I feel confident that it is? (ATI do appear to quote an AGP version of this card..... Have I a PCI express based Mobo??? I dunno anymore....

Sorry about all the questions but I am really concerned as to what I can trust here and because of the warranty issue I can't check it out for myself. Thought Vista might be accurate, but is it?????

[The_YongGrand]

Originally Posted by bluesman737

Hi

Until recently I had always built my PC's. That changed after I bought a laptop which fried and I got a store gift voucher off the insurance.

As you can imagine it was difficult to get what I wanted - had max £600 and the latops I was looking at were underspecced for the price. So went for a desktop. I am an old gamer - so looked for something powerful enough to do that. Ended up with an Core 2 duo E6400 and what Vista tells me is an Nvidia 7500LE.

The label on the carriage box confirms this as an Nvidia 7500LE with 512mb. However a sticker on the machine itself says ATI Express 200!!!!!

Lo and behold in the task bar ATI software is loaded, but when you look in control panel it confirms the graphics card as an Nvidia 7500LE (WMMD) and the driver as Nvidia. (What the bit in brackets after the card model number means I have no idea)

Unable to sort this out went onto the NVidia site and loaded their analysis tool. It confirmed it as an 7500LE with 128mb of memory. It also had an icon next to it to update the driver. When I pressed that it took me to the ATI website!!!!!!

Looking further through the Nvidia site it does not quote a 7500 series anywhere - it goes straight from 7300 to 7600.

Note I wanted to open the box to sort this out but was told I can't do that as my 12 month warranty would be broken.

So;

1 Does someone know what this card is - ATI, NVidia???

2 What the size of memory is, is it any good for games?

3 If it is an ATI card, is the 7500LE older than the 9600 pro?

4 Previously I had a P4 2400 with ATI Radeon 9600pro card... will the E6400/7500LE combo match/beat that?

5 Vista says the 7500LE is on a PCI slot - can I feel confident that it is? (ATI do appear to quote an AGP version of this card..... Have I a PCI express based Mobo??? I dunno anymore....

Sorry about all the questions but I am really concerned as to what I can trust here and because of the warranty issue I can't check it out for myself. Thought Vista might be accurate, but is it?????

Hi there,

To simplify things up:

1.) ATi Radeon Express 200 is a chipset's brand in the motherboard. Just like the Intel 945, 965,...

2.) The nVidia Geforce 7500LE w/ 512mb is a seperate graphics card inside your comp. You have that graphics card for sure.

3.) I a 7500LE is based on a newer technology compared to a 9600pro Radeon.

4.) Yes, it'll beat everything of course.

5.) It is PCI-E card certainly.

hope that helps.

[bluesman737]

The Yong_Grand

Thanks for this.

As I understand this now, the X200 is a PCI Express chipset that has integrated graphics within it and is tuned for the AMD processor family. Does that mean you could run graphics without a dedicated card or just that the chipset will handle traffic from a dedicated card?

If the former is accurate, then assume the Nvidia 7500LE overrides the graphics part in the ATI chipset? As for the rest how well will the ATI chipset work with the Intel Core duo?

All of that said, why don't NVidia show this card as one of their products? Read elsewhere that it's an OEM card produced for HP Computers and that's why, but mine is an Acer machine anyway! And why the heck would ATI get away with a model number that was exactly the same as an NVidia card or vice versa? They haven't to date

All of the above said, where do I get driver updates for it - given that Nvidia don't quote this as one of their cards?

Finally you say it has 256mb with a further 256 of turbocache. Is this all onboard the card or is it taking any from system ram?

[The_YongGrand]

Originally Posted by bluesman737

The Yong_Grand

Thanks for this.

As I understand this now, the X200 is a PCI Express chipset that has integrated graphics within it and is tuned for the AMD processor family. Does that mean you could run graphics without a dedicated card or just that the chipset will handle traffic from a dedicated card?

If the former is accurate, then assume the Nvidia 7500LE overrides the graphics part in the ATI chipset? As for the rest how well will the ATI chipset work with the Intel Core duo?

All of that said, why don't NVidia show this card as one of their products? Read elsewhere that it's an OEM card produced for HP Computers and that's why, but mine is an Acer machine anyway! And why the heck would ATI get away with a model number that was exactly the same as an NVidia card or vice versa? They haven't to date

All of the above said, where do I get driver updates for it - given that Nvidia don't quote this as one of their cards?

Finally you say it has 256mb with a further 256 of turbocache. Is this all onboard the card or is it taking any from system ram?

Well, it's because AMD and ATi already merged, so actually they have links to AMD eventhough it's ATi.

Also, when there's an offboard card (graphics card) installed, the onboard one is usually disabled. The onboard graphics in the ATi chipset is actually maybe around the ATi X300SE performance. (not sure whether it's X300 or 9600).

I'm pretty sure you were asking about why they stick that ATi sticker and not the nVidia sticker. This stickers are usually the indication of the chipset type when in the showcase (like putting these in shopping centres).

The Turbocache actually drink some RAM out of your PC and it's usually *almost* no different than the onboard one. You can turn it off in the nVidia control panel.

Not sure about the drivers, but you can ask nVidia tech support about it.

hope that helps.

[bluesman737]

Thanks again for the advice.

Having read a little bit more about PCI Express, it seems totally graphics oriented and a direct replacement for AGP, so guess the chip set controls the flow between VPU and CPU only....

I saw that the X200 chipset has an X300 graphics chip. Thats where I was getting confused. I had an X300 in the laptop which fried as a dedicated graphics card. I got concerned becau:wall se thought the X200 might be a lesser version of it.

As said, guess the X300 chip is not used as the NVidia is there. But it still seems strange to have the ATI symbol in the task bar which shows the current screen settings. Why is it there if the NVidia is being used? And there is no NVidia control centre anywhere - it looks like the driver loaded might be a Microsoft version as in control panel the card is described as 7500LE (Microsoft WDDM).

Again I am loathe to load anything NVidia right now because their website does not show a 7500 series card on it and, as said, when I had the card analysed by NVidia software from their site for updates it takes me to the ATI site!!!

Understand AMD own ATI, but it still then seems strange to have an NVidia card that NVidia seem never to have heard of running through an ATI chipset. Would make sense to use one of the Radeons, I would have thought, fo an optimal fit.

[Adrian Wong]

The GeForce 7500 LE seems to be an OEM-only card. Not sold elsewhere. You can try downloading the NVIDIA ForceWare driver which works for almost all NVIDIA cards. But if that fails...

That means NVIDIA will not support the card directly. You will have to download the driver from your vendor, e.g. HP, Dell, etc.

[bluesman737]

Originally Posted by Adrian Wong

The GeForce 7500 LE seems to be an OEM-only card. Not sold elsewhere. You can try downloading the NVIDIA ForceWare driver which works for almost all NVIDIA cards. But if that fails...

That means NVIDIA will not support the card directly. You will have to download the driver from your vendor, e.g. HP, Dell, etc.

Thanks once again. It seems daft that NVidia produce a card with exactly the same model number as an exisiting ATI Card.

Have since asked Acer for information as they built the PC. It is annoying that I can't check the info due to the fact that if I open the box, the warranty is null and void.

Just one last thing, can you be 100% sure of this being an NVidia card? I did see that someone was saying elsewhere on the net that this card was made specially for HP.... stranbe it hsould find it's way into an Acer and that it can be confused with an ATI of the same name!!!!!!

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by bluesman737

Thanks once again. It seems daft that NVidia produce a card with exactly the same model number as an exisiting ATI Card.

Have since asked Acer for information as they built the PC. It is annoying that I can't check the info due to the fact that if I open the box, the warranty is null and void.

Just one last thing, can you be 100% sure of this being an NVidia card? I did see that someone was saying elsewhere on the net that this card was made specially for HP.... stranbe it hsould find it's way into an Acer and that it can be confused with an ATI of the same name!!!!!!

Well, it's just a number. The driver should have no problem recognizing it. You can also check the correct model at boot-time (if you disabled Quiet Boot). The VGA BIOS should display the name of the graphics card.

Since it's an Acer machine, you can download the latest driver from Acer's website.

There's no way for anyone online to be sure what card you have. Why don't you check and see what's displayed on the screen when you boot up? It should say something like NVIDIA GeForce 7500 LE or ATI Radeon 7500.

[Chai]

Most Nvidia cards do not show BIOS screen these days.

[zy]

if windows detects it as nvidia 7500, why worry ?.

i doubt that ati 7500 driver will run a nvidia 7500 card.

if you are using windows wddm drivers, you wont have the nvidia icon.

there is no nvidua 7-series stickers provided as far as i'm concern.
even my laptop has a nvidia 7400 but there is no nvidia sticker.