ATI Radeon driver woes

[cutcopypaste]

I have a Radeon HD 5700.

So one day I thought I should probably check for updates to my video driver. Mistake.

There seemed to be something newer on the ATI site so I downloaded it and installed it. Soon my computer started randomly rebooting after BSODing.. this was never when I was there, just if it was left on overnight or while at work or what have you.

I tried Steam's auto driver update thing because it sounded straightforward, and that seemed to work until the audio out with my HDMI was mostly never there (can restart and get it back, but if I turn off the TV I have connected to my PC switch audio back, then try and get it back to the TV, no dice).

So I rolled back the driver.. and the audio-out worked again, but the automatic rebooting was still happening. Not sure what driver version I was at when all this started.

Recently I thought maybe there was a better way. Went on the official site and ran the AMD Driver Autodetect, which found a different driver, but it did the same thing as the one I got through Steam even though I definitely noticed audio driver for the hdmi specifically mentioned when I went to custom-install...

So now I'm rolled back to the one that will probably randomly BSOD me.

Is there any driver out there that will just work properly? Any advice on where to go to find it? Right now I'm on 8.951.0.0 which is allegedly from 08/03/2012

 

[refillable]

Your old driver.

 

[cutcopypaste]

As I mentioned I don't know what version of the driver I was on before all of this went down. I don't think it was the one that came with the card

 

[hunuok]

Sorry to hear about your troubles.

From experience, drivers for 5xxx cards were hit and miss, although, latest drivers should have sorted out the problems.

A number of things you can try:

1. Uninstall drivers from device manager. Install Driversweeper BEFORE you do this. Right click on "display adapters" and select "uninstall". Reboot in safe mode. Run driversweeper and select ATI components. Reboot. Reinstall drivers from AMD website.
2. Try to install drivers that came with VGA card.

Make sure you have reset any overclocks to CPU/GPU to check if BSODs are associated with unstable overclocks.

 

[refillable]

Try very old driver like 11.x or 10.x

 

[cutcopypaste]

I realized I'd been installing drivers over one another rather than uninstalling first and thinking this could be the problem. Is there a reliable driver finder/uninstaller that you'd recommend? I've heard people mention Driver Sweeper but it doesn't seem to be in development anymore or have a Windows 7 version

 

[hunuok]

Here's the direct link:

http://phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html

Good luck.