Question : Problem: Replaced video card with Sapphire / ATI X1650 and now poor video performance

Just got a new 20" monitor a couple of weeks ago (had  a 19") here at the office.  It looked great but it's native resolution (1680 x 1050) was the highest one supported by my video card, and fairly often the whole screen would just go black for 2 or 3 seconds.  The old card was a Gigabyte / ATI Radeon 9200... So I bought what I thought was a much better card, the X1650.  Got the latest driver from Sapphire's site and the install went just like the last hundred or so I've installed - without a hitch.  It looks great, but here's the problem... everything "refreshes?" slowly.  Internet explorer displays pages slow.. you can watch them 'grow' from top to bottom and scrolling or paging down is painstakingly slow.  If there is a window open and not maximized, you can click and drag the title bar to move it around the screen... and it has multiple 'ghost' images that follow it around, similar to what mouse trails would look like if that feature was turned on.  If you open a program, even it's title on the taskbar shows (grows) slowly.  Clicking on different folders in windows explorer displays slowly on the right side as if it's having to create the list of files to show.  The old card had none of these symptoms... aside from the periodic blackout, it displayed all the items I just referred to almost instantaneously with no trails and no perceivable delays (at 1680x1050).  Now this next part seems very strange to me... all video is silky smooth!  It's window opens clunky, but once the video starts playing, it has no jitters or choppiness whatsoever.  Also, photos open very quick just like normal... the first window is slow to open, but pressing the right arrow to advance to the next one is like click click click, bam bam bam, the photos show instantly.  The troubleshooting tab of the advanced video properties has a slider where you can change the video acceleration... reducing this step by step seems to make no difference whatsoever, but setting it on 'none' helps somewhat but it's still not right.  I tried to find some answers on EE and found some references to Directx problems... I downloaded the latest version of directx (10) and installed but no change.  It doesn't seem to be related to resolution either... I can drop it down to the lowest setting and the symptoms do not go away.  I'm stumped, please help if you can.

P4 3Ghz
2GB PC3200
Asus P5P800 (No PCI Express support)

Answer : Problem: Replaced video card with Sapphire / ATI X1650 and now poor video performance

PAQed with points refunded (500)

Computer101
EE Admin