Remember the 3.8 and Monitor Reports?

[Blacklash]

I was one of the guys going around defending Ati when folks were accusing them of frying their monitors with the 3.8 driver release.

Well I am here to tell you I replicated what most people that lost monitors described happening to thier system. The kicker? I did it with a Nvidia card and Nvidia drivers. All by accident. Go me

I wanted to try the older 44.03 drivers on my 5700u for the heck of it. So I uninstalled the 52.16's and my custom Nview files. I used driver cleaner in safemode and got it all save the most base essentials. I reboot.

Dopey old me forgot that the 44.03's were not going to list the 5700u when I went to install them. In one of my less than bright moments I said bump it, and selected the closest thing on the list, the 5800. I figured no biggie I am just going to run a few benches, it will be fine for that.

I reboot. Everything seems fine. The card clock frequencies are correct, temp is cool etc. The monitor comes in at safe low settings like 800x600, 8bit, and 60hz. Here's the kicker. I go to restore my monitor to the settings I always run it at, 1280x960@85hz. I select the resolution, the bit depth then the refresh rate and apply. Bang! The 5700u starts "machine gun spamming" my monitor with refresh rates. So I immediately kill the monitor power switch and slap reboot. I go into safe mode and remove the card to reinstall it as the 5700u with the 52.16. Everything is back to normal, NP.I was lucky. The monitor did not fry.

I am not trying this again My guess is that if people did infact lose monitors in this fashion, their cards were installed as something other than what they should have been, or they had modified their bios to make the system believe it was something other that it was.

I have never had this 'effect' occur on my computer with all the cards and drivers I have owned, both Ati and Nvidia, til now.

Anyway I thought it worth mentioning....

[TheOneKEA]

Imagine that. Maybe that's what the majority of these reports were really about; people uninstalling drivers and reinstalling old drivers and somehow buggering things up....

[slickfloater]

Considering that it took me about 5 tries to get ATI drivers installed correctly on my machine, and that the 3.8's caused me to experience strange refresh rate changes and monitor restarts, I'm not going to be installing any new ATI drivers for a long time. The 3.7's are installed and working well.

I've never had so many problems installing drivers as with ATI's. I'm an ATI newbie after switching from nVidia.

Hey ATI why don't you try the following when making your drivers: btw, I'm using a AIW radeon so this probably makes it more difficult, lucky for me.

when installing new drivers have a program that sweeps the registry making sure no old ATI drivers are installed which of course causes my machine to hard lock when there are old drivers there. Why is this even a problem? nVidia drivers install no problem even when I didn't uninstall the old ones. How do you manage to make a machine hard lock so I have to go into safe mode and uninstall everything just so I can boot up again?

I still have an unidentified USB device in my device manager which windows doesn't even recognize and the drivers didn't install anything for. The drivers that came on the CD crashed my machine and crashed when I was installing them. The 3.8's were pretty bad too finally the 3.7's worked ok.

Warning: all ex-nVidia users, you must know how to completely clean a registry of old video card drivers to install ATI drivers. You must remove all old drivers from windows directories. ATI sent me about a 14 page long document telling me all the bizarre little things that their drivers can't do themselves when installing in response to my request for support since I couldn't install their drivers.

Once I got it working it was really nice and fast though, smokes my old Geforce 3.

[TheTaz]

Originally posted by slickfloater
Considering that it took me about 5 tries to get ATI drivers installed correctly on my machine, and that the 3.8's caused me to experience strange refresh rate changes and monitor restarts, I'm not going to be installing any new ATI drivers for a long time. The 3.7's are installed and working well.

I was leary of the Cat 3.8's too, and stuck to the Cat 3.7's. I also didn't like the idea of them combining the OpenGL and D3D panels.

That said... I'm using the Omega 3.9's, now.

No problems.

Regards,

Taz

[-=DVS=-]

Originally posted by Malficar
I was one of the guys going around defending Ati when folks were accusing them of frying their monitors with the 3.8 driver release.

Well I am here to tell you I replicated what most people that lost monitors described happening to thier system. The kicker? I did it with a Nvidia card and Nvidia drivers. All by accident. Go me

I wanted to try the older 44.03 drivers on my 5700u for the heck of it. So I uninstalled the 52.16's and my custom Nview files. I used driver cleaner in safemode and got it all save the most base essentials. I reboot.

Dopey old me forgot that the 44.03's were not going to list the 5700u when I went to install them. In one of my less than bright moments I said bump it, and selected the closest thing on the list, the 5800. I figured no biggie I am just going to run a few benches, it will be fine for that.

I reboot. Everything seems fine. The card clock frequencies are correct, temp is cool etc. The monitor comes in at safe low settings like 800x600, 8bit, and 60hz. Here's the kicker. I go to restore my monitor to the settings I always run it at, 1280x960@85hz. I select the resolution, the bit depth then the refresh rate and apply. Bang! The 5700u starts "machine gun spamming" my monitor with refresh rates. So I immediately kill the monitor power switch and slap reboot. I go into safe mode and remove the card to reinstall it as the 5700u with the 52.16. Everything is back to normal, NP.I was lucky. The monitor did not fry.

I am not trying this again My guess is that if people did infact lose monitors in this fashion, their cards were installed as something other than what they should have been, or they had modified their bios to make the system believe it was something other that it was.

I have never had this 'effect' occur on my computer with all the cards and drivers I have owned, both Ati and Nvidia, til now.

Anyway I thought it worth mentioning....

Well i was wondering what monitor was installed at the time tha happen , was it your monitor with its inf or some windows unkown or plug n play , after windows reinstall or format or whatever maybe even after clean install of new driver Monitor might need reinstalling also , usually windows defoult it to something very crappy

Anyway good find , only shows its MiKrosoft Windowzz thats are at foulty..

[Blacklash]

I had yet to reinstall my monitor inf. and drivers. I was at default. But that happens everytime I change drivers. I always change res then reinstall inf and driver to change the monitor from default to its proper name.

It is a Viewsonic PF790, and as I said I have never had that sort of behavior before with different ati and nvidia drivers/cards on my rig.

Leads me to believe its modded card bios because the effect has never occured even with the monitor as 'default' save when the system thought the card was other than what is was............

EDIT: I am saying because I could replicate the behavior with nvidia driver and card that it is unlikely the 3.8s are 'bad' drivers. I suspect the card being labeled other than what it is perhaps caused the effect some ati folks saw....

[Sazar]

I'm just glad you didn't bugger up your monitor

all in the name of science eh

[Blacklash]

You should have seen the speed with which I killed the monitor power and rebooted into safe mode .

Luckily I didn't get a pair of dirty briefs either. Scared the heck out of me

[Moose]

I'm always amazed when I see people having so much difficulty installing ATI drivers.

All I've ever done is use the windows add-remove programs to remove the old drivers and control panel... reboot.... stop the automatic windows hardware wizard and then install the new drivers and control panel and reboot again.

Almost no problems at all and it works every time for me.

[eesa]

I don't understand why some ppl are having such a hard time updating their drivers successfully. I don't even bother with the uninstall - I just run the new exe and overwrite the old drivers with the new ones and away I go. The drivers were meant to be installed like that - nobody's expecting ppl to reformat their computers or manually scrub their registries clean or anything even remotely close to that. I can understand one or two cases where stuff happens, but seems like tons of ppl are reinstalling windoze simply to update their drivers. wow.

oh, and for the last time 3.8s aren't killing monitors -it's impossible. And if it makes any difference, I'm happily running the 3.8s.

[Sledge]

That's why you install your monitor drivers right after installing your videocard drivers and you don't select a higher resolution right away.

[Blacklash]

"oh, and for the last time 3.8s aren't killing monitors -it's impossible."

Right that's what I have thought since I first heard it, and have stated such in various forums. The botch I reported only further strengthens that belief.

I have never had any trouble with the cats or dets. This was solely a result of naming the card a 5800 when it was NOT, to try older dets. I have never had to install monitor infs before changing resolutions. I always DO reinstall inf and monitor drivers. This is the first time I have ever seen this effect regardless of card, driver, or resolution changing without the inf.

Needless to say I won't be installing a 5700 as a 5800 again, under any circumstances.