Not a way to get marketshare!

I recently purchased a new Dell Studio XPS 435T/9000. I purchased the cheapest video card because I knew I would be upgrading it. Dell’s site only offered ATI cards and I prefer Nvidia. I received the machine, popped in the video card from my existing computer – PNY Nvidia 9800 GT – and received the dreaded “Code 12: This device cannot find enough resources” error. The screen then went to 4 bit color and 640×480 resolution and there is nothing that can be done to change that. I thought, no problem because I was planning to buy another card anyway. I purchased the new card – BFG Nvidia 275 OC – and the same thing happened. Doing research I found it was most likely a shared IRQ or DMA error. Looking at the device manager I found DMA resources that should have been allocated to the card weren’t but no other device was using the resources – the address range was simply assigned to the motherboard. I tried re-installing Windows several times; I pulled all of the other cards and did a fresh install; I tried to reallocate the DMA address range manually but the device manager would not let me do it. As you might imagine I was extremely frustrated. Much of the research pointed to needing a BIOS update but my machine had version A09 and the only thing I could find on Dell’s site was A07. The longer it went on, the more I felt I had wasted a significant investment. I began having thoughts of returning the entire system to Dell.

Well, last night I finally found an answer in one of the Dell forums. It seems American Megatrends who manufactures the motherboard has a deal with ATI where they have set the BIOS to not recognize Nvidia cards. As I mentioned above, the BIOS on my machine was A09 but on Dell’s site I only saw A07. I downloaded and installed the A07 BIOS and voila! it all works now. Apparently, any machine that ships after June 1, 2009 has the new A09 BIOS that causes Nvidia cards not to function.

This is soooooo annoying. I cannot believe ATI would make this kind of a request AND American Megatrends would do it AND Dell would then sell this crap to the public. The only redeeming thing in this is that Dell did have the A07 BIOS on their web site. I will NEVER NEVER NEVER (did I say NEVER?) buy an ATI product. It is incredible that they would intentionally cripple the BIOS to not recognize a competitor’s product. I don’t know how much they paid AMI for this “deal” but they have certainly shot themselves in the foot on this one. In my opinion AMI and Dell are also at fault.