Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!mbcl!goldman
From: goldman@mbcl.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc
Subject: 8514/A cards: buy ATI, not Western Digital
Message-ID: <477.28574d90@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
Date: 13 Jun 91 14:48:48 GMT
Lines: 39

I thought I should post my experiences with the Western Digital 8514/A plus
card, for anyone thinking of going the 8514/A compatible route.  

I bought the card about a year ago, to use with os/2 1.2 in a clone (Dataworld
386/20, AMI bios 4/89).  The card never! worked right for me; I would
always get occasional, spontaneous crashes that would freeze the whole system,
forcing me to do a hard reboot.  (The mouse cursor would stop moving, and then
I'd have to hard reboot.)  The problems only got worse when I made a 
little LanMan 2.0 network, consisting of a couple of machines with 
WD ethernet cards.  Whenever I tried to backup networked drives (Sytos Plus
software 1.10; Alliance 60 Meg Tape Drive; QIC-36 interface), the
machine with the 8514/A card and the tape drive (NOT! the one where the
networked drives resided) would go on the fritz.  The screen would get 
completeley munged, as if the 8514/A card was no longer putting out the
right vertical or horizontal scan rate.  Then I could soft reboot, but
the screen would remain munged until I hard rebooted.

A week ago, I bought the ATI 8514/A ultra card.  All the problems went away.

I might as well also report that I saw a comment on the IBM Atlanta BBS,
under the topic "OS/2 on non-IBM hardware" a statement from a guy who said
"We returned all our Western Digital cards and replaced them with ATI ones.
The Western Digital card is neither hardware nor register compatible with
the IBM card".  Also, Alfred Poor, in a recent review of 1024x768 cards
in PC magazine, said that, in order to get the Western Digital card to
work under Windows 3.0 enhanced mode, you have to have an "emmexclude="
statement (or something like that) in your Windows.ini file.  

So my advice is: if you're thinking of buying a Western Digital 8514/A card,
don't.

		Adrian

-- 
Adrian Goldman                         |  Internet:  Goldman@MBCL.Rutgers.Edu
Molecular Biology Computing Laboratory |  Bitnet:    Goldman@BioVAX
Waksman Insitute,                      |  Phone:     (908) 932-4864
Rutgers University,                    |  Fax:       (908) 932-5735
Piscataway, NJ 08855 USA               |