Would appreciate guidance on making choices

[Daoerx]

Hello,

So this forum has been an immeasurable help when i had an older custom built laptop with an Nvidia graphics card. I found it pretty easy to navigate the Nvidia section of the forums and make choices based on tons of information provided there.

For that i am thankful.

However, i purchased (last year) a new laptop (DELL Studio 1749 with a core i5 430 and ATI Mobility Radeon 5650 HD, also a 4 gb RAM and running win7 64 bit). Never before in my entire life have i met the ATI/AMD video hardware, so i am now at a huge loss. I would hope some of the brilliant minds here would spare a minute of their time to provide some guidance.

So, as far as i gather, DELL won't let me install the drivers that ATI themselves provide, instead asking me to only use drivers from their web-site. Fair enaugh. But the problem is - they won't update it. Currently, the latest ATi 5650 driver that DELL provides is from February 2010. And that's ridiculous. So i thought i would try some custom drivers.

However, i am very reluctant to try and experiment, in this area, also due to my lack of general information about the ATI stuff (which, as far as i understand differs quite drastically in some cases, from Nvidia). I would love to know, or be directed where to begin to look for, the latest stable ATI 5650m HD drivers (because, if i remember correctly, not all new drivers are actually improvements upon the last generation, etc.). And maybe, if there is no general consencus in the proffesional community about what is the most obvious choice at the moment, some of you would advice me in regards to - what do i look for and what parameters do i judge to determine whether some driver is acceptable to me or not (i mostly just play game after work, for recreational purposes).

Apologies if the wall of text was uncalled for, and here's to hoping someone would chime in.

Darius

[jackau]

Hi you have the same issue as the previous poster on the 5650 model

The way i deal with the new driver issue is as follows:

Found a driver that able to over write the Toshiba driver set I have now uploaded to a file sharing service:

http://www.fileserve.com/file/q6eJqSx or

File name: 11-2_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc.rar File size: 74.53 MB

Once over written, the 5650 may show in Device manager as 5xxx / 6xxx series graphics card

Then you can grab any drivers from this site and install with no trouble.

http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=46

Good luck!

[Daoerx]

Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated.

I have seen the previous posters post, but figured it dealt exclusively with Toshiba's.

Thanks again. Will report on my (mis)adventures when something transpires. :)

Darius

[jackau]

Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated.

I have seen the previous posters post, but figured it dealt exclusively with Toshiba's.

Thanks again. Will report on my (mis)adventures when something transpires. :)

Darius

That is not a toshiba only issue, is AMD issue. They went backwards in recent years, back in the R 1xxx era, their official drivers work smoothly directly from their site and Nvidia owners has to went to the a site like this one for drivers that works.

Now, Nvidia's official drivers are upadated and stable on most notebooks, but AMDTi stopped supplying universal drivers, since older drivers takes as uch as 1/4 of the power from the graphics card, making newers games unplayable in some cases!

good luck.

[Daoerx]

Just a quick reply. And maybe here's to hoping this will help others as well.

I went to the site you recommended - the guru3d forums. Recently (in relation to the whole The Witcher 2 upheaval) ATI released new hotfixed drivers 11.5b. So one guy there included a fix for the mobility users like DELL or TOSHIBA. Here is the link: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=344990

You just need to extract the fix package into the original 11.5b instalation folder and launch everything with setup.exe.

This worked for me - the drivers are now properly updated and i am seeing a huge rise in fps on all of my games (been playing with the 2009-12 drivers till now).

Thanks again for the support!