swapping nvidia card for ati card on vista 64

Davegod

Platinum Member
Nov 26, 2001
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I'm taking out a Nvidia Geforece 7800gtx and installing a ATi 4850, on Vista 64.

What's the "correct" procedure?
Just uninstall the nvidia drivers, shutdown, physically swap cards, then power on and install ati drivers on when windows loads?

I'm a bit wary because from my experience with XP I ended up doing a clean install, and IIRC Vista changed the way it handles the video drivers. I'm really not up for having to format.


p.s. I take it the only ATi software worth installing is the driver/CCC suite?
 

palladium

Senior member
Dec 24, 2007
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Download Driver Sweeper ( google it), install it. After you uninstall the existing drivers via Add and Remove Programs, boot into safe mode, run Driver Sweeper to remove the remnants of your old driver. After that, you can install the new card's drivers.
 

SSChevy2001

Senior member
Jul 9, 2008
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Don't use Driver Sweeper. Just uninstall your nvidia drivers and software, and load only the ATi drivers. Instead of using CCC just use ATi Tray Tools.
 

Mem

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
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This is what I did when I went from Nvidia to ATI on Vista x64,install DriverSweeper,uninstall Nvidia drivers via control panel ,booted into safe mode and run DriverSweeper,shut PC down remove Nvidia card and install ATI card,when you switched PC back on and boot to desktop you can install latest ATI drivers,if by chance you get any Nvidia DDL files trying to load(this happened to me) then use Regedit and remove the offending Nvidia DDL files.

Nvidia drivers don't alway uninstall cleanly from my experience even with DriverSweeper.


Never bother with CD drivers with the video card,always grab the latest from their website.
 

error8

Diamond Member
Nov 28, 2007
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Originally posted by: Mem
This is what I did when I went from Nvidia to ATI on Vista x64,install DriverSweeper,uninstall Nvidia drivers via control panel ,booted into safe mode and run DriverSweeper,shut PC down remove Nvidia card and install ATI card,when you switched PC back on and boot to desktop you can install latest ATI drivers,if by chance you get any Nvidia DDL files trying to load(this happened to me) then use Regedit and remove the offending Nvidia DDL files.

Nvidia drivers don't alway uninstall cleanly from my experience even with DriverSweeper.


Never bother with CD drivers with the video card,always grab the latest from their website.

I did this when I changed my 8800 GT with 4870. The only difference is that I had no dll files trying to load from Nvidia. Everything worked smooth.
 

Davegod

Platinum Member
Nov 26, 2001
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thanks folks.

whats the difference between CCC and Traytools?

(come to think of it, this is my first ATi card :eek:)
 

Mem

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
21,476
13
81
Originally posted by: Davegod
thanks folks.

whats the difference between CCC and Traytools?

(come to think of it, this is my first ATi card :eek:)


ATI CCC .

ATI Tray Tools .

I just use ATI full package suite (Drivers and CCC) 8.12s being the latest at present.
 

FalseChristian

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2002
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Use them both! I worked for me when I had 2 3870s in Xfire. It's like using Rivatuner for nVidia GPUs.:)
 

Tempered81

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2007
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Originally posted by: Davegod

Just uninstall the nvidia drivers, shutdown, physically swap cards, then power on and install ati drivers on when windows loads?

Should you remove the NV card from device manager as well, then reboot with the ATi card in?
 

cmdrdredd

Lifer
Dec 12, 2001
27,052
357
126
Originally posted by: Mem
Originally posted by: Davegod
thanks folks.

whats the difference between CCC and Traytools?

(come to think of it, this is my first ATi card :eek:)


ATI CCC .

ATI Tray Tools .

I just use ATI full package suite (Drivers and CCC) 8.12s being the latest at present.

I find CCC to work just fine for everything that was necessary. I didn't need 3rd party tools for my 4870. The only exception was using rivatuner to control fan speed.
 

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: solofly
Originally posted by: SSChevy2001
Don't use Driver Sweeper.

Why not? Nvidia uninstaller leaves files behind, just like ATI does...

then windows reinstallation, although extreme, might be better long term solution
 

SSChevy2001

Senior member
Jul 9, 2008
774
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Originally posted by: palladium
yeah.. was wondering why would you skip Driver Sweeper...
Because it's a waste of time and it truely doesn't remove all the older drivers. It certainly doesn't fix some of the problems we hear about in the forum like CF not working or BSOD.

 

Davegod

Platinum Member
Nov 26, 2001
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just to continue on my ati-n00bishness, is there a HD accelerator for ati? PowerDVD has an option for Avivo but from what I can tell it's for the x1000 cards only?

Or just leave it on CLEV-2?


up and running btw, 11789 (SM2 4955. SM3 5855, CPU 2737) on 3dmark 2006; which from the comparisons seems okay