Best ATI driver for x1600/1650?

[Krusty]

My sister's PC had the fan stop on her old vid card. Was getting artifacts pretty bad inside The Sims. I open the case and won't you know it, the fan's not turning on the Ge 4400Ti. Well, it's an old card.

I can't get the fan off (the screws chewed up my small screwdrivers! ) and the fan is seriously stiff just trying to turn it when the system was off. I'm guessing it broke down weeks ago, as I was suggesting driver changes to get rid of the artifacts a while ago.

Anyways, she's got a new x1600/x1650 coming. I think that's the model she's ordered. I think it'll be in the mail today, and no doubt she'd like to use it over the weekend.

What's the best ATI drivers for this card?



P.S. We need a sticky with the "best drivers for X card" in it.

[Roscoroo]

well the 7.7's work good on the pci-e cards , i'm not shure about the agp ones though.

[Krusty]

It came with 7.4 or 7.3.


It's crashing the Sims repeatedly. It loads fine, but if you try to rotate the camera it freezes forever then comes back and eventually crashes if you do it too much.


I've got to do some google searching on the matter.

[Roscoroo]

you might have to do a reinstall of the sim's and run dxdiag so its refreshed ... remember you went from a geforce to a Ati chipset.

[Krusty]

Yeah, I'm going to load driver cleaner pro, strip it all, and install 7.7. My sis is really going to hate me if my best suggestion is "reload the sims"

I'll leave that for a last resort.

[Roscoroo]

remember you can save all her settings ect ,,, and then just do a reinstall /over write. after you have the vid card goodies set up 1st .

[Krusty]

Actually I had some problems getting any drivers to recognize it. Even the drivers off of Diamond's own webpage (which LIST this card as supported) cannot detect the card at all. There's nothing that can be done, it seems to be a conflict with the Intel motherboard and WinXP.

Other folks have had the same "not detected" problem with every set of drivers out there, but it works perfectly in Vista. They had Intel mobos also (more recent chipsets, but still). The box even has a "Vista certified" logo on it.

We've boxed it up and it's going back. We're just going to get something that doesn't have built-in conflicts.


Overall the specs seemed impressive. Pity that it didn't work.

[Roscoroo]

try throwing the 4.12's at it ..they work on almost everything ati .

also if that has a onboard vga dbl check thats its disabled in the bios ... it shouldnt matter that its a intel board . the only diff you may need to look at is the voltage requirements if thats powered thru the agp port .

[Krusty]

It shouldn't matter, but it does.

The board doesn't have onboard video, nothing to disable.


Trust me, I tried over half a dozen different driver versions, from ATI themselves to the manufacturer's webpage itself... It starts the install then sounds an error, quits, and says "No valid hardware detected" or some such. There's definitely a hardware conflict going on.

Nothing can tell there's an X1650 installed on the system except the drivers that came with it, and those CLEARLY don't work right.

There are many similar stories with X1650s that I found with a google search. None exactly like this (with the sims and all) but many to show that the card has many problems on many machines. For simplicity's sake it's going back. Not worth the effort.

EDIT: P.S. I checked the PSU output, and it's enough. There's not tons of stuff in this machine. It doesn't have a power hungry CPU. It's only got 1 HD. The connector on the vid card was isolated (no other items plugged into it). It should have worked fine. It just didn't.

[Roscoroo]

cc , I was just tossing idears at ya .

no secret power connector either i presume ?

[Krusty]

I plugged a molex into it. Had I not I don't think it would have lasted as long as it did before crashing.