Whitebook and Windows 7 pre-release ATI supplied drivers

OK, so I am still playing around with the old OCZ whitebook and decided to drop a Windows 7 64-bit on her. Installation went fairly well with some interesting results.

First, and I think I mentioned this elsewhere, after installation Windows 7 Update had a nice little surprise waiting--Windows 7 pre-release drivers for the ati hd 3870! And, for what it's worth, the WEI score for the ATI card (single GPU in my case) increased dramatically from 5.9 in Vista to 6.4 in Window 7.

I wasn't sure if this is Windows 7 or the drivers, so I'm thinking since Microsoft says that Windows Vista drivers should work on Windows 7, will the pre-release Windows 7 drivers work on Vista?

And, yes they do!

The drivers are dates early December (10?)

The end result was the same in the WEI score, but a 40+ point increase in Sysmark 2006. That was with an install on top of some older drivers, as I didn't do a clean install (should have, I know)--don't have time right now as I have to leave, but for people who want to play around with this you can get the pre-release drivers at the Windows update catalog

http://catalog.update.microsoft.com

On a sadder not, Windows 7 harddrive performance takes a big hit as Intel has yet to release chipset drivers.

Still something to consider while we await the next ATI driver release.

 

Very nice info. That's the 8.12 driver, if dated dec 10th. I'll have to sit down and take a look for myself. Hopefully the CCC will install and function

 

how interesting....

 

Just got on Windows Update, and the version is 8.56.1.4 and 8.12 WHQL is 8.56.1.0 - This is the Hotfix driver ATI released for the 8.12 version.

 

Am in the process of burning the DVD right now. I finally managed to get a key this morning. I can't believe they didn't anticipate the pounding their servers would take yesterday. Anyways, was just gonna post a discussion thread for those who have installed it to post their feedback but then I saw this one. I am planning on dual booting with Vista and have already created the new partition that is needed.

Also, don't forget to download that patch for windows media player so it doesn't screw all your music up.

 

Wow. Can you let us know if everything else on the Whitebook works on Win7? Things like the fingerprint reader, webcam and so on. I might just upgrade to Win7!!! Very exciting.

 

Do you mean an actual upgrade by installing over Vista? The beta ends August 1st or something like that I think, so I wouldn't do that. There is a good and brief how-to at lifehacker on how to dual boot or even triple boot.

Here it is if anyone is curious:
http://lifehacker.com/5126781/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-with-xp-or-vista

If you want windows 7 legally, here is a method that works from lifehacker also:
http://lifehacker.com/5128018/windows-7-beta-product-keys-now-available-for-real

Not sure how long Microsoft is gonna be doing this though. Just thought I would share.

 

im sure around that time they will release a newer beta or a rc1 that people will be able to use

 

I have win7 installed on my ocz and it works flawlessly. Been using it for two weeks with this rig. All Vista drivers work the same on Win7. No issues so far. I even used my modded drivers and it installed perfectly. Win7 is gonna be the best change MS has ever made. It explains why MS is pressing all the Vista commercials recently. They wanna sell before it's too late to sell.

 

Do you have vista and 7 installed or just 7? Also, have you tried playing any games? If you have, how do they run?


Edit:

Ok, I just finished installing Windows 7 and am using it right now and it is quite impressive. The one thing I noticed right away is that it does not see my other partition that has Vista on it. But all you have to do is change the drive letter for your Vista partition/drive and it will work fine.

Also, did anyone elses connection speeds drop significantly? What I mean is that all I am doing is browsing the internet and grabbing the drivers 7 didn't pick up to see if they work and it is rather slow, much slower than normal.

 

Wirelessly, I have not seen a difference. Have not tried wired.

Also, am I the only one seeing poor disk performance when compared to Vista?

Ewrecked, did you get the chipset drivers to load?

 

yea.. I downloaded, and extracted. Then, I used device manager and the Have Disk method to install. Just went to system devices and updated driver, pointed to an .inf in the extracted folder. No problems there.

 

If you don't mind me asking, which chipset drivers? THe ones from the OCZ site? Off the driver disk? Or from INtel?

Mine wouldn't install that way or any other way.

 

I used Intels Chipset driver package. On their website it has a How-to for manual installation. Worked just fine, but I couldn't use the install .exe - only the have disk method worked.

 

I know this thread is a few days old and I hate to revive it, but I just wanted to update this issue. In the beginning of the thread, I noted that the graphics performance increased but drive performance plummeted.

Well, as counter-intuitive as this sounds, I turned off drive caching and drive performance jumped dramatically from 2.9 to 5.3!

Wierd....

 

Hmm..interesting. RAID?

 

Nope....just a regular sata drive.

what is your wei score with it on and off?

 

Mine is in the same with caching on and off