User talk:Jbdubbs

Hi there. I hope you'll forgive the intrusion, but I'm getting more desperate and this is the best way I could think of to seek your knowledge.

I have a Dell 1737 laptop running Gentoo, and I love it. But recently I have been having trouble with my graphics card.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV635 [Mobility Radeon HD 3650]

It seem as of ATI Catalyst 11.2 something has happened to by BIOS... my RAM timings in particular, and I can no longer drive external monitors at a proper sync rate. I think my card BIOS has been improperly modified by Powerplay, and my RAM clock is wrong.

I suspect the BIOS because reverting to any previous driver doesn't have any affect. But beyond that amdcccle reports my core clock at 450 and my RAM clock at 500, while this wiki page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Mobility_Radeon_HD_3xxx_Series

suggests 500/700 are correct.

Detail of my observations are here: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=160284

I was wondering if you have any idea where I could get a clean BIOS? Also I am a bit concerned that the free ati flashing tool, atiflash, doesn't seem to recognize the BIOS type on this card. Do you have any pointers, or know anyone who can help set me and my card straight?

-- Well, couple of things. A driver isn't going to flash the card, you specifically have to do that with the proper utility, and its not installed by default. If you're running Catalyst (fglrx), try switching to the open source driver temporarily (radeon) and see if the problem clears up. If it does, it's obvious that the problem is in the proprietary driver installation and reverting back to an earlier version might not be cleaning up the mess of the new version. A full uninstall of fglrx instead of just a rollback might be a good idea, as well as a rm -rf /etc/X11/xorg.conf, then just run a basic config without all the junk. Most information such as xorg.conf, exact specs on your laptop from the dell site, not just what lspci says it is, etc. Let me know if any of my previous suggestions have fixed the problem. --Jbdubbs 02:39, 24 February 2012 (GMT)