Drivers and M17x R4

Now I'm looking and mulling over the driver list. I know that many have said to install the new drivers over the Dell ones but if I installed the Intel HD Drivers first could I skip directly to the AMD drivers and still keep switchable graphics working? Or won't that work?

 

It may work, it may not. I know some people have complained they couldn't get the crossfire or SLI working with the latest AMD drivers, and that they resolved the issue by installing the default AMD drivers from the Dell site first, THEN the latest AMD Catalyst version. But your sig says you have a single AMD 7970m, yes? If so, I'd say try going with the Catalyst 12.6 or 12.8 first (after the Intel HD graphics, of course) and see if that gives you any issues. You can always uninstall the AMD software and reinstall the Dell default version to get everything working. It's not going to damage the GPU so there's not much to lose there.

 

Alright. I'll probably do that then. I've got a 750GB drive sitting here right now and I'm waiting on the new laptop still. What I'll do then is pull the 640GB (after setting it up to test things) then install the 750GB in it's place and do a clean install and see how it goes.

 

Ahhh. So your new R4 is coming with a 640GB HDD, yes? And you are swapping it out for the WD Scorpio Black 750GB, yes? Have you considered getting an SSD for your R4? It will make a world of difference. In any event, you should be happy with your new system.

Ps: are you planning to use the UJ-240 burner with the eSATAp enclosure? If so, I recommend you DISABLE the USB powershare feature in the BIOS. I've had issues with plugging my optical drive into the eSATAp port (I use the same enclosure) prior to startup and then the BIOS would not recognoze ANY of my hard drives. Disabling powershare was what corrected it.

 

Actually I would end up installing them both for added storage. I'm doing an initial swap to go through the clean install process and test to see if I can install straight to an AMD provided driver without issue. This way if there is an issue I can just fall back to the stock install.

The 750GB was supposed to be for a different system but through some supervisor threats I managed to get them to replace the one in the system already. The BluRay drive will be connected on demand so it might not be a huge issue but I'll keep your tip in mind in case I do have issues.

The SSD drive is a planned future upgrade and I wouldn't normally even be getting the 750GB HDD (just using the one that came with it) if it wasn't for Dell resisting the move to replace the hard drive in my current laptop.

 

Here's a guide on how to do a Clean Windows 7 installation, and here's the drivers list with the correct installation order.

I'd recommend you use the Dell driver, but you can always download it from AMD and use this method to reinstall the dell driver if it crashes.

 

Thank you for that information. Like I said above I'll be doing this test run on a different drive anyways to minimize issues so if it doesn't work I can just blank the drive and go back.

 

You changed your sig...are you reconsidering the R4?

 

Nah... I just had to reorder so the ordered specs were changing.

 

Ahh, got it. Are you going to run both the 750GB HDDs in RAID 0? That's what I''m doing with both my WD7500BPKTs...but they are only storage drives. I'm using an SSD for the OS and programs. Even for storage drives, they run pretty quick.

One thing you might want to check on is how well 2 x 8GB, 1 x 4GB, and 1 x 2GB sticks of RAM work together. It might be better to use the 2 x 8GB sticks by themselves. Defnintely something to look into.

 

Yea I'll check on the ram bit. I can always pull them but I don't see an issue. As for the hard drive I'll likely just leave them as individual drives.

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