Bug Or Feature? AMD's Catalyst Doesn't Recognize NB Driver
Table of contents
- 1. Installed Or Not?
- 2. Installation And Verification
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.
Related Stories :
- ATI Catalyst drivers have a problem
- AMD Releases Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 Driver
- AMD Releases Catalyst 13.4 WHQL Drivers
- AMD Publishes Catalyst 12.6 WHQL Driver
- AMD Releases Catalyst 13.2 Beta Drivers
- AMD Releases Catalyst 13.1 Drivers
- ATI Catalyst 10.4 Preview Driver Now Available
- Catalyst 9.3: 1st Unified Windows 7 Driver?
- AMD Releases Catalyst 12.1; Previews Catalyst 12.2 Drivers
- AMD Releases Catalyst 8.1 Driver
I would like to hear what AMD says about their Catalyst installer "bug"...
THESE are the type of articles that made Tom's awesome years ago, hopefully you guys will keep them coming.
Thanks, very interesting.
So, I guess since I installed with the express method, I'll never know.
It still didn't work for me on my radeon 3200 laptop...
Am I the only one that took note of the fact that the driver version installed was "1.3.3.7"? Maybe Microsoft and ATI/AMD were trying to tell you not to bother
Yes I love articles like this also. Very informative and helpful.
The "Bug or feature" only works with Apple.
...just sayin...
This problem has certainly been around for years. I remember posting a question about it on the AMDGame forums.
How about just installing 10.6!
wtf, update? why they hide it? wtf ATI !!!!!!!
I have been fighting (and giving) with this since forever! Thanks for a very useful article!
This is why I visit this site!
A very useful article.I never knew this feature existed because I never ran into any problems whatsoever with AMD's drivers.Now,
@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.
I would like to hear what AMD says about their Catalyst installer "bug"...
So would I
I wish my hd 5770 would just play any game with windows 7 64bit. I get an ATI driver crash every time. Google turned up tons of people with the same problems.
so what the article is saying is that if you do an express setup then the problem is solved? well, there you go glad i could point out the already availalble solution. Are you sure this site isn't part of the US Government?
@yousseff 2010 obviously you don't run crossfire or tri crossfire system, only 10.4 works ok with that setup, everything else is crap. Also case Nvidia has is the only example you could put out there. Wtf you are talking about, think of their 4670?
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!
I have encountered the North Bridge problem (says it installs correctly but then doesn't recognize that if you run the installer again) for as long as I can remember. I'll definitely try the workaround (and update) options when I upgrade to the 10.7's in a few days.
Just a thought, but I'd like to make a suggestion to the folks that complain about ATI drivers. Thoroughly check your power supply. If the PSU is not supplying the juice required by the card(s), you're going to get repeated driver error messages. Make doubly sure the +12v rail isn't drooping. This is a fairly common issue that causes a lot of misplaced blame.
Cheers, and happy computing.
It don't think you can classify this as a bug because the default configuration has been set this way. it would be interesting know why.