Mobility 5870 Bus Speed and Catalyst 12.3 Weirdness???

For all you G73JH owners out there with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, what speed does Catalyst Control Center and GPU-Z show the PCI-E bus to be running at?

Reason I ask is that I just updated my video drivers from Catalyst 11.12 Official to 12.3 Official (just released) and GPU-Z from 0.5.5 to 0.6.0 and am getting weird readings. As you can see, Catalyst Control Center now says that it is running PCI Express and PCI Express x16 whereas it used to say PCI Express 2.0 and PCI Express 2.0 x16:



Now the story with GPU-Z is a little different, but still very strange. When I had GPU-Z 0.5.5 before it would say PCI-E x16@x16 under the Bus Interface category, which was kind of ambiguous. Now, it clearly says PCI-E 1.1 x16@x16 1.1:



Even running the so-called "Render Test," which is supposed to ramp up the GPU load so that the correct bus speed is displayed, doesn't change the setting to PCI-E 2.0 like it's supposed to.

And to top it all off, these aren't the only weird things that I'm seeing with these two new updates. For some reason, when Catalyst 12.3 finished installing I got a message that "Warnings occurred during installation. View log for details." But clicking on "View Log" didn't do anything. Everything seems to run fine with this new driver, but the Catalyst Control Center menu entry that usually comes up when you right click on your desktop is completely gone now.

I'm completely baffled. I've used Driver Sweeper, reinstalled 12.3, reverted back to 11.12, you name it short of a full system restore. The weird thing is that now when I try to install the older Catalyst 11.12, I get the same "Warnings occurred during installation" message when it completes. I wonder if there something seriously wrong with my system or just bad AMD drivers.

 

Yeah yeah can happen
I get those "warnings appeared" since 11.12, but don't have any problems with the driver.
Regarding the bus-speed, you probably need to do some benchmarks to see if it really got slower. I don't feel any speed issue since I have it installed.

pato

 

Well I did some benchmarking. Going from 11.12 to 12.3, almost everything seems to be a smidgen faster across the board so I guessing this is just a software issue with Catalyst Control Center and GPU-Z.

 

I didn't get a warning, but I got a fail when Catalyst Mobility 12.3 finished installing on my G73jh-rbbx05. The log said that the HDMI driver failed to install.

 

I personaly had no issues.

I did not uninstall 11.2. I just install 12.3 over it.

I hope this is fixed for you.

 

That's not the correct way to update drivers. Just saying.

 

PCI Express 2.0 showing here probably like always

 

I agree, but I did not have any issues. So even with it being wrong, I am not seeing a problem, this time. That might change..

Also if ATI/AMD was smarter they would make the installer program smarter and have it remove the older drivers before installing the new ones.

In 1 easy to use program.

Just saying

 

Hey guys.
I've been out of the loop for a while and I'm still running Catalyst 11.6.
What version is currently considered to be the best or most stable one ?

 

11.12 and 12.3 worked just fine for me.

 

I would always use the most current one unless there is a known, widespread issue with it. I update my Cats once every quarter (no reason to do it every month) and have always experienced some very small performance gains after every update. At best, some benchmarks and games definitely ran a smidgen faster, but at worst everything stayed the same from the last driver.

 

Fair enough... 12.3 it is then
Thanks

 

Dude ive been straight updating drivers by just installing them over the top for like 11 revisions now. Never had a single issue. Running 12.3 right now with no issues what so ever. Zero stability issues and performance is the best it has been with the newest driver.

That clean install thing is really if your only having issues. If you not having issues, upgrading drivers is perfectly fine on windows 7

If doing that is the "wrong" way to update drivers they wouldn't code the installers to allow that. Upgrade away folks. I went from 10.11 to 12.3 upgrading EVERY single time and had NO and I mean NO issues.

 

I had huge issues with 12.3 and also stability issues on my G73JH, in my opinion a bad driver for the G73 so I stay with 11.10 which also supports PCI-e 2.0 correctly.

 

Not in my experience. Catalyst 12.3, in fact all the Cats I've used since getting this laptop, have been rock solid for me. Also 11.10 also did not report PCI-e 2.0 correctly for me, but it's already been established that it's just a software error and does not affect performance.