4879 to 5870 - Reinstall Drivers ?

[TechBlaster]

Well, against my better (to save $$$ for Christmas presents) judgement in a moment of weakness this weekend I pulled the trigger on an XFX 5870 from Newegg's batch. It's replacing an MSI 4890 I've had for a while. The order went thru, I've got a tracking # & should be getting the card on the day after tomorrow.

I've routinely upgraded my video cards pretty regularly, selling off the old ones before their prices on Ebay dropped too much, but everytime over the last few years I've coupled the upgrade with a rebuild of Windows (last time I went from an 8800GTS to ATI so reinstalling Windows seemed like the smart thing to do). The thing is, I just rebuilt my system about a month ago because of a hard drive crash & installed Windows 7, 64 Bit at the time (from Vista). It took a while to get my apps, email, shortcuts set up as I like them so I'm really not too thrilled about re-installing again this soon.

Since I'm going from a 4890 to a 5870 my question is will there be any real benefit to reinstalling Windows ? Should I just wipe the ATI drivers I've got on there now out & re-install just them or will everything be just as good / optimal if I just swap in the new 5870 card & let the currently installed drivers re-detect & adjust as however they do ? I'm currently running the 9.11 drivers & noticed on ATI's site these are the same ones they've got listed on their download page for the 5870's so it's not like I'd be upgrading to a newer driver version.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Much thanks...

 

[TechBlaster]

Oops ... Mods, title should have been "4890 to 5870 ...". I see I can edit the post but not the title to fix it.sorry

 

[Crosshairs]

Just put the card in and your all set.
Since they use the same drivers, I see no reason to do anything.

 

[DarrisBard]

Should I just wipe the ATI drivers I've got on there now out & re-install just them

In my opinion this is the best course of action. No need for a complete windows re-install, just remove the ati drivers and then re-install ati drivers. I once switched a card without re-installing drivers and it crashed like crazy. Worked fine after I did it properly.

 

[Crosshairs]

In my opinion this is the best course of action. No need for a complete windows re-install, just remove the ati drivers and then re-install ati drivers. I once switched a card without re-installing drivers and it crashed like crazy. Worked fine after I did it properly.

It makes no sense to remove and reinstall the same drivers.

 

[DarrisBard]

It makes no sense to remove and reinstall the same drivers.

I'll defer to you since you probably have more experience. In my case I was told that even though the drivers were the same the card itself was different so things were setup differently. I did experience constant crashing until re-installing. That was on XP and was my experience.

 

[fullvietFX]

The ATi driver installs different things on the computer depending on the card installed. So yes, re-install.

 

[TechBlaster]

In my opinion this is the best course of action. No need for a complete windows re-install, just remove the ati drivers and then re-install ati drivers. I once switched a card without re-installing drivers and it crashed like crazy. Worked fine after I did it properly.

The more I think of it the more I agree with you. My 1st gut feel was to just do as Crosshairs suggested, but since I'm going from one generation ATI card to another if I just swapped cards & the drivers hung or crashed the system trying to adjust I'd probably end up re-installing Windows since I wouldn't have a good feeling if anything else was corrupted. Uninstalling the present 911 Ati drivers & re-installing after swapping cards really doesn't take long at all & is probably pretty good insurance even though I wouldn't expect trouble swapping without re-intstalling.

Hopefully the 5870 will give me a nice speed boost & supress my 'upgrade cravings' for a while now ...