Drivers seem to be a nightmare w/ AMD still (5870M)

Seems every time I've ever touched an AMD card, I've had headaches and nightmares with drivers. I'm used to being able to just download the latest driver and it working, (Nvidia). I'm running 5870M's in crossfire, downloaded the latest beta drivers from AMD, installed fine and working great in windows, but when I benchmark I get horrible artifacts and graphics wrapping all over the screen. Been searching for over an hour now and cant find any information as to what driver works the best with these cards and laptop... and the drivers on the Dell website are almost 4 years old, which is just pathetic lol.

Almost given up searching, seems its true Dell drops support on their laptops after a year max. Its too bad considering its a great hardware design. Has anyone figured out what the best AMD drivers are on these?

 

Went to uninstall the drivers, and it uninstalled the uninstaller apparently, but the drivers are still fully installed. How the hell. Doesnt show up in add/remove programs anymore.

 

If that happens you can use the AMD driver installer to uninstall the drivers. Try the drivers from this website, that's what I used: Videocards - ATI Catalyst Windows 7 8 and Vista

By the way, the 5870M is a really old card by today`s standards, using modern benchmarks on an old card will only degrade the card itself and shorten it`s life - so artifacts and such using these benchmarks are not so much an issue. As long as you can game fine with the card, then that should really be all that matters. I was able to play FarCry 3 on Ultra settings at 40fps average on the 5870M, so that should give you an idea of what to expect with the card.

I used to benchmark all the time on my 5870M - and look where that go me: my 5870M lit on fire. And yes, AMD drivers are extremely horrible to use on older cards, but I have just got my R9 270X`s in my desktop and the drivers are really great - a lot of improvement has been made.

 

"using modern benchmarks on an old card will only degrade the card itself and shorten it`s life"

No. Just no.

 

Constantly putting the gpu under stress like 3D Mark benchmark tests will degrade it. I'm not saying like once every few months or something, but a lot more frequently, yes. Especially on cards that are already a few years old and have gone through extensive gaming use, benchmark tests push the card to it's limits and if it has been extensively used throughout the years then it can lead to damaging the card.

 

Well, starting to realize a lot of the games I play, arent working well with the ATi card. Lots of graphical glitches, and no way to run updated drivers, stuck using the 4+ year old driver set from Dell. Maybe upgrading to a Nvidia based gfx card will be the first thing I do. Just need to figure out what.

 

Were arifacts only appearing in newer games or on older ones too?
This could be from number of things (Faulty card(s), overheating, not able to run at stock voltage/clocks, to crossfire not being supported in specific game)...
So you need to make sure wich is it, do you know how to open the laptop, take out the GPUs clean them and do a repaste?

 

Its just specific, newer games. Benchmarks run fine. Sig updated w/ scores.

 

Do you have stock vbios or REV1?
If not, i'd recommend to update vBios and the install latest Drivers.

It's most likely driver related, because Crossfire support can be very fricky when it comes to newer games.

 

I had issues with 13.9, the last set of drivers I put on my R2 was 13.4.


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I tried installing the latest beta drivers but got crazy glitches when running any type of benchmark. I have the latest vbios also. I can install 13.4? Seems like anytime I tried to install any drivers other then the dell or newest, it wouldn't load the driver and install went abnormally fast. That's after cleaning with cc cleaner and ddu in safe mode.

 

Well i'm still on 12.10 TBH xD, but i haven't heard anyone having problems with 13.11 beta v9.5 (The latest driver available).

The only reason that i still havent updated is that i barely even play games anymore :/

 

Ever since 10.x Catalyst drivers, it fixed the BSOD issue with ATi/AMD's CCC conflicting with Dell's own CCC. So you had to either do a clean install of the drivers (purging registry, CCleaner, major PITA) or do the ghetto driver update, extract the driver, update in Device Manager via the INF files. But ever since like 1.5 years ago, it shouldn't BSOD with the R2, AFAIK.

 

I never got any BSOD or any issues installing, the graphics were just seriously messed up going nuts, textures blotching all over the place. Hard to explain. I'll maybe try a new windows install and driver install when I get off work.

 

Try using one card at the time in master slot to see if it's a GPU issue.... (4 runs of Crysis GPU_benchmark should be ok, if it crashes it's an indicator of a bad GPU) (Also try playing the same game that is giving you severe artifacts ATM)
If both work ok in master slot, i'd say it must be driver/crossfire related.

 

Always try this method.

 

from time to time I have crashes with 13.9 too, unfortunately, the link to win7 64bit 13.4 from the driver site linked here redirects to AMD's website and is essentially a dead link

 

Here is 13.4: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Driver v.13.4 free download for Windows Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8 64-bit
You are welcome

 

wewt! thank you!

 

Sure, no prob , let us know if it's really better than 13.9