At this point I am scared to install AMD mobility drivers

[cen1]

I love AMD but today I was yet again reminded why their mobility GPUs and drivers suck. And at this point I am literally scared installing a driver on any AMD laptop. This is a bit of a rant but I just went through 4 Windows installs.


Case 1:
I clean my friends's HP laptop and install an SSD because he complains everything is super slow. I install Catalyst drivers (legacy, it's a few years old laptop). Everything works great, system is "incredibly" fast.
After one week I get a call that he has infinite reboots and blue screens.
After digging on the system I find out:
-the blue screen is surprise suprise cause by atikmdag.sys (no shit.. what else)
-the driver broke system so much that you couldn't even boot into Safe mode
-as soon as I install any version of AMD driver the system will blue screen crash at boot
-thankfully a windows provided driver with an update kinda works and saves the day (altho I am still not 100% sure it actually does, if it will continue to blue screen with that I am fu**ed)

Case 2:
-my own laptop is blue screening from time to time until one day, the GPU dies, I get a full mobo replacement
-installing any other driver version except some obscure asus provided one from 2010 ends up with black screen
-I have to turn off hardware acceleration in firefox because if I don't, I end up in blue screens

So even on my system, the experience is a complete disaster.


At this point I am not sure I could buy or recommend a laptop with AMD graphics.. altho I'd really want to. :\

 

[Silverforce11]

For older laptops just go with the windows update drivers or the one from the manufacturer. They work fine. As soon as you try to use direct AMD drivers, things get funky.

Thats my own experience with laptops with Radeon 5770.

 

[cen1]

The worst feeling is when you try to do a favor to a friend and fix his machine but it ends up like this and you are not sure if it's your fault and you bricked a 500$ laptop.

 

[Silverforce11]

That's one thing I dislike with prior gen of AMD notebooks, you can't use official drivers and rely on manufacturers to modify updated drivers, which sometimes doesn't happen.

I dont know the situation now but I wasn't happy with the Mobility 5770 as I couldn't get updated drivers for it since HP refused to update such old tech.

 

[Tsavo]

atikmdag.sys is the same thing that broke the HDD in a friend's laptop.It was spamming the hell out of the event log and cooked the drive.No wonder that it's still an issue years later.

 

[postmortemIA]

I have multiple AMD GPUs (work, home) for which last two driver releases are BSODing like crazy.

 

[cen1]

It seems to me that AMD doesn't actually do any QA on older devices when releasing the drivers, it's up to manufacturers to verify them and they don't do that because they would rather sell you a new device. But in this case it was even more weird because official HP driver also broke the system.