Legit Reviews

Hello everryone at Legit Reviews, I have been browsing the forums here for a while but this will be my first post, sadly it isn't on a very happy note...

I build my PC about 4 years ago or so.. she was good to me and pretty up there in standards for a while... She is a AMD 64bit 3500+ system on a Gygabyte motherboard, 2 HDDS, 1 WD raptor 10,000 RPM ( main partition with XP pro SP2 ) and a utility HDD with 120gigs; 1 gig Corsair Xtreme memory; with the ATI PCIe X800.

The problem is that I just recently re-formatted for the first time in a while, I downloaded the latest Catalyst driver back and it was giving me some ridiculous error message that I coulden't really decypher so I hit the google and searched for solutions and read that maybe it was .Net 3.x giving me issues or maybe I should re-vert to an older driver version. I took the latter option and grabbed the catalyst 5.8 driver pack which was a rather big mistake on my part and in retrospec I should've grabbed Catalyst 7.x . Well, i installed said 5.8 driver package, re-booted and Windows started to load and I hear a click coming from my tower, after I hear the click I get the Blue screen everyone loves to see, my computer re-boots and AGAIN the blue screen. again and again I get this and ( thinking irrationally when I should've tried safe mode >< ) I give up and re-format again....

And this is where I am with you fine people right now, on a fresh install without my Catalyst drivers... I would like a reccomendation for how to go about this installation process as I have gathered that ATI drivers can be rather finicky.

Install .net 1.1 and 1.1 service pack, install .net 2.0 and then install the latest drivers and CCC. Alternately install drivers without the CCC and use ATI Tray Tool instead.

I personaly have found the CAtalyst 6.9 driver package to be the winner for all Dirext x9 cards from the x000 series all the way to the X1k series. I not only get the most stable performance out of it on every system i put it on but my 3d mark scores on my personal systems ( this 1 with 2x x1950xtx in crossfire and my older 1 with 2x x850 in crossfire) see anywhere fromm a 500-1000 point gain in total points. It well outperforms the latest 8.1-2 drivers and is way more stable than the favored 7.1+ driver series wich I have had many bugs with.