Uninstall drivers before switching cards?

[14k]

Hi I'm having problems with my MSI R6950 card, so I borrowed a 'friends' Visiontek 5450.

My question is can I just do a straight swap, or do I have to uninstall and reinstall drivers? According to amd.com both cards use the 11.8 Catalyst software suite drivers

Thanks

 

[renz496]

it is fine to do direct swap. what exactly the problem with your 6950?

 

[14k]

Buzzing sound (90% sure it's coming from this card) which seems to be getting worse. Started off just when mouse scrolling and running 3D Mark.. now it seems to jump in when just switching windows or any general activity. There is sometimes a buzzy screen flicker when the screen loads something new, e.g. like a refresh or when the windows screen first pops up.

 

[photonboy]

Actually, you SHOULD reinstall the drivers. AMD may bundle graphics card drivers as part of the same package, but then Windows likely extracts only the information it needs for the card detected.

I'm not certain of that, but it's so simple to do it this way:

1. Remove driver from Add/Remove
2. Power down PC
3. Swap cards
4. Power up PC
5. Install drivers

 

[renz496]

i'm not really sure about AMD cards because it has been a long time since i use one. but when i swap my GTS250 for GTX460 the driver work just fine without the need to re-install the same version of driver (though i did re-install the driver later because the driver being used is not the latest one at that time). OP just want to so some check on the cards so i don't think he need to re-install the driver every time he swap the card. but if the driver suite did work like you said above then maybe he have to do it the way you have suggested.