When installing AMD's current northbridge drivers, the "success" confirmation message, installation log entries, and info in the Device Manager might lead you to believe that everything was installed just fine. Too bad the Catalyst setup says otherwise.
Tom's Hardware was made aware of a rather curious issue when one of our readers asked us for assistance. While at first glance it may not seem very serious, the frequency of its occurrence at least makes the issue a minor annoyance. After searching the Internet and finding a large number of forum threads on the subject, we came to the conclusion that the event described by our reader was far from an isolated case. This piqued our interest in the matter, especially since no plausible explanation had yet been offered. The issue boils down to the Device Manager and Catalyst disagreeing on whether the northbridge driver is actually installed or not.
The reader had already contacted AMD support, but since the system was working without any apparent problems, the answer he got was that everything seemed to be in order. This answer did little to satisfy him—or us. We went through the installation process on three different Windows 7 systems and managed to reproduce the issue in all cases. Our reader was right, after all.
The issue manifests itself under the following circumstances:
- Windows 7 (x64, x86)
- Motherboard with AMD chipset
- Catalyst 10.2 to 10.5
- Setup in Custom mode (not Express mode)
We hope that this article can be of help, because an old but very effective trick that we'll explore later in this article actually turned out to be the solution. It also has the potential of eliminating other irritations that may arise during the installation of AMD/ATI drivers. Furthermore, we will briefly describe a hidden option in the Catalyst installer that might be of use.

Thanks, very interesting.
...just sayin...
@lradunovic77:you might want to try the driver release that fried the GPUs from Nvidia or the flagship GTX295 that overheatead and didn't run some games on high resolution due to limited frame buffer(which it was designed to do).I think ATI might have some driver problems but, they never released a driver that fried GPUs(at least none that I know of).Just think of their 4670 and shut up.
@superflux: just please read the drivers release notes to know if your laptop brand is supported or not,as I ran into the same trouble with my laptop when I couldn't update my drivers and finally found out that the only drivers that will work are the ones supplied by the manufacturer of the laptop.
Sorry for the long comment.
Thanks, very interesting.
...just sayin...
This is why I visit this site!
@lradunovic77:you might want to try the driver release that fried the GPUs from Nvidia or the flagship GTX295 that overheatead and didn't run some games on high resolution due to limited frame buffer(which it was designed to do).I think ATI might have some driver problems but, they never released a driver that fried GPUs(at least none that I know of).Just think of their 4670 and shut up.
@superflux: just please read the drivers release notes to know if your laptop brand is supported or not,as I ran into the same trouble with my laptop when I couldn't update my drivers and finally found out that the only drivers that will work are the ones supplied by the manufacturer of the laptop.
Sorry for the long comment.
So would I
CCC is a crap and other million people will tell you the same. ATI needs 4 months before they fix all issues with new released game. Crossfire scale is a joke compared to SLI. Latest 10.6 is horrible for BF BC2 in Crossfire setup. I can give you list and list of broken things with CCC, not to mention lack of good AA support. What a joke!
Cheers, and happy computing.
....BF:BC2@ runs perfect for me with latest drivers. 40-50fps @ 1600x900 Med-Hi details 4x AA. And I only have a 1GB HD4850 running on an i5-750.
One of us is the exception to the rule here....