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Bug Or Feature? AMD's Catalyst Doesn't Recognize NB Driver
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:
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.
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Igor Wallossek wrote a wide variety of hardware articles for Tom's Hardware, with a strong focus on technical analysis and in-depth reviews. His contributions have spanned a broad spectrum of PC components, including GPUs, CPUs, workstations, and PC builds. His insightful articles provide readers with detailed knowledge to make informed decisions in the ever-evolving tech landscape
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 :p
