NightLamp's Journal: Intel G965 Graphics Chip

I bought an Asus P5B-VM mobo for my new comp in Nov 2006. I was sold by the literature on the new Intel G965 graphics chip, and the price; CAD$145.00, and I've had good results with asus boards in the past.

The G965 performed well at first boot of xpsp2, my dell 24" monitor was supported and win was ok with the 1920x1200 resolution. Then I started to notice, after a monitor resume after suspend that the text was banded across the screen, every inch or so the text would appear bolded, I applied changes to the few options provided by the Intel graphics driver with no positive result, reboot fixed it about 1/2 the time. For the next 2 months I checked for driver and bios updates on both the Asus and Intel websites. Eventually some new drivers were published, but this banding still happens once in a while, the quickest fix is to cycle power to the monitor and hope that it goes through its auto-adjust phase which seems to fix the banding.

Performance is good for 2d and mixed for 3d:
Unreal Tournament '99 runs at 90+fps 1280x1024
Second Life won't work at all
Xpand Rally(steam) gets miserable frame rates, ie 10, at any resolution (dx9 or gl)
Civ IV runs fairly well although late in a game (1950+) the plethora of overlays on each tile appears responsible for the sluggish scrolling and zooming.

(tbc)