Danger of switching Nvidia card with an ATI?

[Matt2]

Ok, so the parts for my new college system started to come today, but not all of them came. One of the parts was my new Radeon 9700. My current home computer is running a GeForce4 ti4400.

My question is, if I want to put the Radeon in my current system to "test it out" before the rest of the parts for my computer come in... how hard is it to go from Nvidia to ATI, and then back again? Will I need to format?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I've owned Nvidia cards since TNT and I have found them all to be very easy to swap an Nvidia card out for an Nvidia.

Thanks!

 

[pillage2001]

No reformats. Just remove the detonator drivers and clean the registry using a registry cleaner. Then, pull the card out and replace it with the new one. Install the ATi CAtalyst driver first, then the control panel and you're good to go.

 

[Jittos]

having an Nvidia card in your system, then switch to ATI will cause your computer to explode in to pieces... 😉


j/k



anyhow, just uninstall the older driver b4 u install the new one should be fine. switching vid card usually dont require you to format.

only need to reinstall windows if u r changing motherboard.

 

[HiTek21]

I had trouble switching my GeForce 3 to a Radeon 9700, I could not clean out all the old nVidia drivers each time I ran driver cleaner something would show up. The Radeon worked it just not to its full potential, got low benchmark scores. I finally reformatted my PC and installed a fresh copy of Catalyst 3.4 and works great.

 

[Matt2]

ok, thanks for the input, I guess I'll just wait for the rest of my new PC to show up.

 

[AnMig]

very easy

use ghost or drive image to make a back up image of your operating system then play around as much as you want.

when you are done messing around just re-install the backup image.

it takes around 5 min to do a back up depending on the size and another 5 min re-installing a image. beats having to re-install OS and software

peace