Radeon HD 5870 and X1550 In Same Machine - Blue Screen

[skulkingghost]

Ok so here is my problem,
I have the machine listed below. I have a Radeon HD5870 plugged in and 3 monitors in to that currently. I want to add a fourth, so I purchased a cheap x1550 at microcenter (PCIE) and tossed it in one of the open pci express bays.

The card will work fine in safe mode, but when i boot into windows 7 I get a blue screen atikmdag.sys error. If I uninstall the driver. I can get into windows 7 with it showing as a standard vga adapter, but there will be a yellow ! next to it and it will give me a code 10 error device can not start.

I downloaded the legacy driver and tried to force it to install those drivers but it wont. Any ideas?

 

[A5]

You probably should have bought a newer card - having two sets of drivers installed is bad mojo, and the latest drivers don't play nice with old cards (as you're experiencing). If you really want/need 4 monitors, you could either sell your 5870 and get a 5870 Eyefinity edition (the crazy one with 6 ports) or get another 5xxx series card.

 

[Qbah]

Ok so here is my problem,
I have the machine listed below. I have a Radeon HD5870 plugged in and 3 monitors in to that currently. I want to add a fourth, so I purchased a cheap x1550 at microcenter (PCIE) and tossed it in one of the open pci express bays.

The card will work fine in safe mode, but when i boot into windows 7 I get a blue screen atikmdag.sys error. If I uninstall the driver. I can get into windows 7 with it showing as a standard vga adapter, but there will be a yellow ! next to it and it will give me a code 10 error device can not start.

I downloaded the legacy driver and tried to force it to install those drivers but it wont. Any ideas?

I'd say the card is too old. You would need two driver sets from AMD at the same time... the legacy-support one and the standard Catalyst set. It sounds weird and is probably not supported.

My advice? Return the X1550 and get a HD5450/HD4350/HD3450 for the extra screens. All of them are supported in the same driver release as the high-end HD5870 and should work fine with it.

 

[skulkingghost]

@qbah. That makes sense. I will return it on thursday and try and grab a 3450.

What about a geforece 210, I have seen those cheap but worry about mixing brands (ati & nvidia)

 

[Qbah]

@qbah. That makes sense. I will return it on thursday and try and grab a 3450.

What about a geforece 210, I have seen those cheap but worry about mixing brands (ati & nvidia)

Out of those 3 get the cheapest one. It's not necessarily the HD3450. The HD3450 is the oldest one.

As for G210, as long as you're running Windows 7, you should be fine. Win7 fully supports both vendors at once. Vista doesn't and if you're on XP with a HD5870, you're doing something very wrong

Though you might ask for more comments on it, as I have never tried it myself - only read an article or two and read some comments. However, again, you should be fine as long as you're on Win7 with mixing. I wouldn't do it myself... if the difference is small enough, just pay for a Radeon and save yourself from any possible future headaches.

 

[thedosbox]

Out of those 3 get the cheapest one. It's not necessarily the HD3450. The HD3450 is the oldest one.

As for G210, as long as you're running Windows 7, you should be fine. Win7 fully supports both vendors at once. Vista doesn't and if you're on XP with a HD5870, you're doing something very wrong

Though you might ask for more comments on it, as I have never tried it myself - only read an article or two and read some comments. However, again, you should be fine as long as you're on Win7 with mixing. I wouldn't do it myself... if the difference is small enough, just pay for a Radeon and save yourself from any possible future headaches.

Yeah, he should be fine with the dual ATI/nvidia setup. The thread on hybrid physx should demonstrate that.

 

[skulkingghost]

Fixed by purchasing a HD4350, thanks for the help guys!

 

[GotNoRice]

I had a similar setup for a while with a PCI X1300 along side my 4870x2's. The only way I was able to get it to work is to install the 4870x2's like normal and then simply let the X1300 use the Microsoft driver it automatically installs. That seemed to do the trick. The 4350 is probably the better long-term solution though.