Updating ATI Drivers in T500/T400 Switchable Graphics

I will be doing a reformat of my T500 very soon, and since there's been several major updates to ATI drivers since the last Lenovo-packaged release for T500 graphics drivers, I'd like to have the latest performance boosts to squeeze every bit from my Radeon 3650M.

So, I was wondering if anyone installed Lenovo's switchable graphics package and then successfully updated the ATI discrete GPU to the latest drivers? If so, what procedure did you follow?

Thanks in advance.

 

I did a clean install on a T400, and I just used the ones from ATi's website and it installed fine for me. Lenovo drivers may set clock default clock speeds to save battery, other proprietary settings, as I know they do that for the Intel graphics driver. ATi drivers would likely give you better performance, also check out MSI Afterburner and try overclocking the chip.

 

You used the Catalyst 11.x drivers? When I tried that on my T500 in the past, they had more issues than the Lenovo ones (ie: changing screen brightness didn't work properly on discrete graphics). For that reason, I generally would prefer sticking to the whole Lenovo package including the integrated graphics (which I'm very satisfied with) and updating only the discrete ATI drivers.

 

Ya I used 11.8 Catalyst. Ya the screen brightness was what I was talking about, if you use manufacturer spec drivers it sometimes messes it up but OEM drivers don't have that issue but sometimes it takes months for them to have a stable release, but you have more control over clock speeds on the GPU.

 

I had catalyst 10.something installed on my T400 (direct from AMD), and yeah the screen brightness controls didn't work when in discrete mode, a bit of an annoyance but I did notice a little better performance with the AMD drivers, which is why I kept them. And after I did a clean install on my T400, I first installed Lenovo drivers, then did the AMD ones over it.

 

I've used Catalyst 11.1a through 11.6 on my T400 (too lazy to go further) with no significant issues (11.5 broke Dead Space 2 for me) and lots of performance boost.

forum.thinkpads.com • View topic - T400 - GPU Overclock with Switchable!

You install the Lenovo switchable package first, switch to the ATI adapter, and do a forced driver update in Device Manager via Have Disk. Choose the HD3400 series entry after selecting the driver file out of C:\ATI\catalystwhatever\Packages\Drivers\Display\W7_INF or W76_AINF. It should work.