Question about ATI drivers

[Derrickr]

<p>Hello</p><p> A few months ago I purchased a Diamond brand x1950 pro.  When I first got the card I downloaded drivers from the Diamond website but the last time they updated drivers was April.  A lot of reviews I read before I bought the card warned about how long it takes for them to release updated drivers.</p><p>I decided to use drivers from the ATI website and my card started running hot.  For whatever reason when using ATI drivers my fan speed doesn't adjust to load; it stays at 4%.  I can download ATI tool to manually change the fan speed but opening ATI tool gives me a 25% chance of crashing.</p><p>Based of of your experiences is it best to stick with the drivers from a specific brand or go just go with the most recent drivers you can find?  Any help is appreciated.</p>

[Tyndaleon]

Different people have different approaches, but my policy and methodology has *always* been to identify the chipset of the device and go straight to the chipset's manufacturer for their most updated drivers....this applies not only to video cards but motherboard chipsets and, I've found just as importantly if not moreso, ethernet/NIC drivers too.  For example, I've had a motherboard or two with an onboard gigabit ethernet adapter that the chipset is produced by Marvell.  Using the motherboard manufacturer's drivers on one in particular, I was experiencing intermittent latency/connectivity issues....I got the chipset ID from Device Manager and then went straight to Marvell for their latest drivers for that model and the NIC performed beautifully from then on.If you use/rely on onboard sound I'd use this same approach there as well, but in my case I never use onboard, I pretty much stick with a Creative card of some type.

[Bournville]

It may be the ATI drivers. I have an ATI X1650 PRO 512MB AGP card (made by ATI themselves).<div></div><div>I tried upgrading the drivers to the latest ATI drivers and they caused my whole PC to run incredibly slow. I reverted back to the ones I have been using for the last 3 months or so and everything is running fine again.</div><div></div><div>Bizarre.</div>

[thyriel81]

The 7.8 ATI Drivers have a bug regarding the fanspeed control. Im a lot active in a big german hardware forum and a lot of people, including myself, had problems with the fanspeed control and 7.8 drivers (mainly HD2600XT/Pro and some X1950Pro users). This can occur in the following way:As soon as CCC is loaded (it seems not to relay on the driver itself as it happens begining a few seconds after login to windows) it can happen that the fan entirely stops working and wont start again, even if the temperature reaches critical levels (above 100°). I also heard a lot of reports that the fanspeed isnt adjusted when temp goes up and as you have it, that it runs on very low levels.The main problem now is that CCC doesnt report fanspeed or warns about critical temps. i even heard of one where the GPU got permanently damaged due to this (luckily he got the card replaced)Fixing this is rather simple, uninstall everything that is related to the ATI Drivers (Drivers, CCC, Avivo, etc.) via ATI uninstall manager. Reboot system and reinstall it.

[Derrickr]

<cite>thyriel81 wrote:</cite><blockquote>The 7.8 ATI Drivers have a bug regarding the fanspeed control. Im a lot active in a big german hardware forum and a lot of people, including myself, had problems with the fanspeed control and 7.8 drivers (mainly HD2600XT/Pro and some X1950Pro users). This can occur in the following way:As soon as CCC is loaded (it seems not to relay on the driver itself as it happens begining a few seconds after login to windows) it can happen that the fan entirely stops working and wont start again, even if the temperature reaches critical levels (above 100°). I also heard a lot of reports that the fanspeed isnt adjusted when temp goes up and as you have it, that it runs on very low levels.The main problem now is that CCC doesnt report fanspeed or warns about critical temps. i even heard of one where the GPU got permanently damaged due to this (luckily he got the card replaced)Fixing this is rather simple, uninstall everything that is related to the ATI Drivers (Drivers, CCC, Avivo, etc.) via ATI uninstall manager. Reboot system and reinstall it.</blockquote>Thanks for the info.  I'll try this.