[WaltC]

Originally Posted by noko

I would think those with 3D shutter glasses would appreciate the highest resfresh rate possible. Anyways:

• *Now does running the RAMDAC at a higher speed shorten the life of the VPU?
  *Does it increase heat output as well? Usually when you limit operation to less then it true limits in engineering is so to prolong its lifespan.

So is ATI worried about increasing the return rate of broken Radeon R300 series chips?

Well, when you consider that these artificial limits don't exist for the 9700 Pro in their Win9x drivers, I guess the answer has to be "no," right?....

What gets me is that nVidia's doing the same thing in its reference drivers. It's for that reason I'm thinking this is something related somewhow to Microsoft XP driver certification (much in the same way that the presence of vsync on/off controls violated the certification requirements for WHQL under Win9x.) It would just be nice to find out why these guys are artificially restricting refresh rates under Win XP. It looks like everyone is in the dark here on this one--and the people who do know won't talk about it for some arcane reason...