Adding x1300 to 4850 crossfire, driver issues?

[GotNoRice]

I currently run 4850 crossfire. There are a few issues I’d like to fix.

-I can’t overclock the cards while using dual monitors. If I overclock even one Mhz the screens will start to flicker and the display driver will fairly promptly crash. I understand that this is an issue with the idle clocks on the cards and I can fix it by using a custom bios that keeps the cards at 3d clocks, but I don’t really want to load a custom bios on the cards. Right now I can only overclock when using a single monitor.

-Although I use 2 monitors right now, I’d like to add a 3rd. I can only use more than two monitors with my 4850’s if I disable crossfire.

So I picked up a x1300 PCI card. My idea is that I’ll just use my 4850 for my main monitor and have the x1300 handle both the 2nd and 3rd monitors. Hopefully this both allows me to overclock my 4850’s and run 3 monitors.

My problem is that it seems the newest driver for the x1300 is the 9.3.1 legacy driver:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownlo...spx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.7&lang=English

Any customers using a combination of a ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series, or ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series product with any of the legacy products listed above in a single PC system must use the ATI Catalyst 9.3 or earlier driver. All future ATI Catalyst™ releases made available past the ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 release will not include support for the legacy products listed above or any of the features associated with those legacy products.

That has me a bit worried. The 9.3 driver would probably work fine on my 4850’s but I like to stay current with my driver just so that I can have the best crossfire support in games. On the other-hand, could it just be that those are vista drivers and they are referring to the Vista limitation of not being able to load multiple video drivers?

I was under the impression that you could, for example, have an ATI and Nvidia card running side by side in Windows 7. If that is the case it shouldn’t be much of an issue running a newer and older ATI card, right?

 

[sirmonkey1985]

no theres no issue as far as i know as long as you use the 9.3 drivers.. but anything newer then that wont work because they dont have legacy portion of the drivers from 9.4 or newer..


the only thing im not totally sure on is weather it will work with the 4850's in crossfire..

 

[GotNoRice]

no theres no issue as far as i know as long as you use the 9.3 drivers.. but anything newer then that wont work because they dont have legacy portion of the drivers from 9.4 or newer..

But aren't you able to install two separate video drivers under Windows 7? It would just seem so strange to me if you are able to install an ATI and Nvidia card side by side but not two ATI cards.

Well the card arrives today and we'll see what happens.

 

[GotNoRice]

Just wanted to follow-up. I finally tried this (x1300 arrived last week but only had a DMS59 port so I had to order an adapter).

I put the x1300 in and Windows7 x64 booted up and automatically installed drivers for it. I am still using Catalyst 9.8 on my 4850's.

After that first boot, I noticed that Crossfire wasn't enabled nor available on my 4850's. I rebooted and Crossfire was available again. I enabled crossfire and I was getting graphical corruption on the desktop (with and without Aero). But one more reboot and everything is working perfectly now.

Only issue is slight lag when I drag something from one monitor to the other but I think that's probably a limitation of the PCI bus on the X1300.