Windows 7: Radeon X1300 Pro?

Alright, well I've been on a budget and I just recently had some hardwre failures on my previously 7-compatible PC, so I decided to buy some newer (but cheaper) parts off eBay to rebuild, I went with a socket 775 board and a Dual-core pentium (seeing as my old system was an old Athlon 64), so anyways, I had a Radeon HD 2600 Pro card on that system, however it was AGP and this new board is PCI-express, I actually didn't think about that until after I ordered the parts, so I quickly bought a cheap card I found on ebay (it only cost me $10 after shipping, so its not a huge loss if nothing works), its a Radeon X1300 Pro 256MB PCI-E x16.



Now I don't know what I was thinking exactly when I ordered this, I just knew I needed a graphics card for my system, I read it was DirectX9 compatible, and figured it'd work fine (I don't game on the PC obviously or I'd have a much better system to do so, the most graphic intensive work I do is emulation of 2D consoles and watching videos)

So I find out these cards don't have WDDM 1.1 drivers, but otherwise fully support everything 7 requires for aero, the parts haven't arrived yet so I haven't assembled it or installed Windows yet, but I'm wondering if there is any known way to enable aero on this card? maybe some kind of work around or a way to force aero on without WDDM 1.1 drivers? It's got WDDM 1.0 drivers from vista?

Or will I have to live without aero until I can afford to get a better card for this system?

Sorry, don't know about that card specifically, but I have a system running an X1650 (same generation) and it supports Aero just fine using the legacy drivers.

Just make sure that if you go to AMD to get drivers, the file you download has "legacy" in the filename.

I believe the latest Catalyst version that works on the legacy cards is 10.2.

As Mark said Aero will work just fine on that card. Here is a link to the legacy driver he mentioned,

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...eonaiw_xp.aspx

I have an even older 9800 Pro running in my kids computer using the same legacy driver, and Aero works just fine.

Well, thats good to know, because I've read conflicting things all over the place, the official Windows 7 compatibility database states its compatible 32 and 64 bit, but then I've read conflicting stories everywhere, from that ATI cards won't run aero on Windows 7 unless they're in the HD series+ to the X series will run it sometimes.

Thanks for the download link as well, I'll have the parts here in a few days so I can test it.

there should be a current list of nvidia and amd cards that support aero on vista and 7