Bizarre issue - Desktop Card being detected as mobile version (ATI)

[rsd]

This is as much a rant as it is a question.

Just upgraded to a 2500k and Biostar Z68 MB from a Q9550. Had a Radeon 4850. Fresh install of windows and long story short no matter what I did it, it would always install the mobility version of the drivers or if I was able to get CCC installed with drivers it would not run on start up. Even ATIs detection utility recognized it as a mobile card?!?!

Tried many things, different drivers, updating fully windows and .NET, updated MB BIOS, reset power connections etc etc. This was a working card on my previous build. For now I went back to a spare 8800 GS that works fine. I'm just so frustrated after spending easily 4-6hrs on this.

If anyone has any ideas would love to hear it or if there is something obvious I missed.

 

[GaiaHunter]

And did the card have any problem working with the mobility drivers?
What driver version did you installed?
Did you use GPU-Z and checked if the card was reporting the correct number of shaders, correct clock settings and ram?
Did you try to play a game?

When you go to the www.amd.com webpage you choose drivers->Desktop Graphics->Radeon HD series->Radeon HD 4xxx series->Windows version, correct?

 

[rsd]

And did the card have any problem working with the mobility drivers?
What driver version did you installed?
Did you use GPU-Z and checked if the card was reporting the correct number of shaders, correct clock settings and ram?
Did you try to play a game?

When you go to the www.amd.com webpage you choose drivers->Desktop Graphics->Radeon HD series->Radeon HD 4xxx series->Windows version, correct?

I didn't test any games but it was able to display the desktop ok. I still didn't see how to adjust underscan/overscan settings without CCC however.

I tried several drivers, 11.8, 11.9,11.10,11.11,11.11 (the desktop versions).

I didn't try checking the shaders or other settings, didn't think of that but would've been a smart thing to do.

Yes that's how I selected the drivers as you mentioned. If i let the ATI tool auto detect it would find the mobile ones. Windows also varied from auto-installing the mobile drivers or the desktop ones depending on what I was doing (I was going through so many iterations it was hard to keep track).