ATI and Nvidia drivers in one system, can you feel the love?

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whitewale

Limp Gawd
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Jun 23, 2004
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I build a new system for a friend, and at his request added a tuner card. To my great dismay it turns out the tuner card uses an ATI chip - and in the age of unified drivers installed the full catalyst set. What promptly made the 6600GT I installed crash like crazy.
Any suggestions which driver sets are known for good compatibility or known to clash badly?
 
Wow, thats messed up.

Didnt know they were that bad together.

Try an nvidia motherboard with an ati video card and the ati tv tuner :D
 
there should be a way to install specific parts of the catalyst driver. not owning any ati products, i don't know for sure, but i suspect you can.
 
That's odd. The multimedia center drivers (MMC) should be a completely separate driver package. Let me dig up a link for you....

Go here: https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27

It looks like they may have changed their menu system, but in any event, go to the OS you are using, find the tuner card that you installed, and click that link.

If it is like the TV Wonder VE, which I use, then there should be three main components: DAO/MDAC, drivers, and multimedia center.

These drivers are different from the Catalyst drivers, which you should stay away from.

If the catalyst drivers won't uninstall cleanly you may need to reinstall windows, install your chipset drivers, then detonator drivers, then your TV tuner card.

Hope this was useful.

Tsumari
 
Thanks, I will see if that helps. Right now I have a "stable" (aka not crashed in 2 h) build, after using driver cleaner to completly reinstall the nvidia drivers. Looks like a lot of this is depending on the order in which the drivers are installed.
 
I never could get a 9800 Pro or a ATi Tuner card to work right with my nforce 3 mobo
 
ebony and ivory... :D

u_95244
 
I've got a 9800 pro and an ati tv tuner on an nvidia motherboard =P nforce 3 socket 754 asus k8n.

Tsumari
 
IceDigger said:
Wow, thats messed up.

Didnt know they were that bad together.

Try an nvidia motherboard with an ati video card and the ati tv tuner :D
Click to expand...

I've got an Asus A7N8X deluxe (NForce 2 Ultra) with a 9800 Pro and the ATi TV Wonder Pro. It works pretty well.
My only problem is that MMC crashes about half the time when I try to move my TV from one monitor to the other, so I have to keep it only primary monitor. It really sucks when it crashes because MMC takes up 100% of the CPU and can't be killed by the task manager. Even worse, it seems to have a really high priority which means that other programs barely function - the only way to get out of it is a hard reboot.
 
What have we all learned here?

Catalyst = video cards

MMC, DAO, Capture drivers = Video in/out TV Tunning.

Never had a problem with an ATI tuner card in a system with Nvidia drivers. If you installed the Cats, you probably caused a major conflict as the Catalyst drivers also install SmartGART which will allow you to set the AGP bus speed via software instead of the BIOS.

Run ATI's driver uninstaller which should already be in your Add/Remove Programs and remove the ATI drivers. Then download the updated MMC, capture drivers and DAO components. If it's still not stable, Fdisk format reinstall and learn not to do that again.
 
atually, what I've learned here is:

stay away from ATI products that install unnecessary drivers :)
 
Cmon now, don't cop out without saying what happened. So far all you've said is "it installed the wrong drivers"

What disc did you use? (eg what was it labeled, I'm guessing it came with the product) What button did you hit on the menu? I'm actually kind of curious to see if they put out a TV tuner disc that automatically installs catalyst, but I sort of doubt it as that would be pretty dumb, unless the tuner came with an ATI card or something.

Let me know some details so I know if someone at ATI is an idiot or if you screwed up =P

Tsumari
 
stay away from ATI products that install unnecessary drivers
Click to expand...

Hah, you might as well not buy any Microsoft product either then. I think they include 90,000 drivers now, installing a few hundred of the more common ones but just not telling you about it. Microsoft will also install dozens of instances of your single network card if you change networks frequently - All without the users knowledge.

Heck, by default Microsoft even loads services that most home users will never use. Control panel > Admin tools > Component services > Services.

But I digress: With either ATi or NVidia or *gasp* both - if you have a special setup, you will have to install and configure them manually. In a two card mixed mode setup, I am 100% sure you cannot do an "express" install and have it work right.

But at least you don't have an SLI setup where you have to have two of the exact same boardmaker with the exact same videocard bios and have it work for only maybe half of the games.
 
Tsumari said:
Let me know some details so I know if someone at ATI is an idiot or if you screwed up =P

Tsumari
Click to expand...

The catalyst drivers were part of their "click here to install drivers" mode install package. I didn't even realize they were going in until I saw it unpack "catalyst" during the file listing. So yes, if I'd been prewarned, I woud have run a custom install and probably avoided the hassle. But this is the first time I run into this kind of issue.
 
Odd Wasnt their a article on [H]ardOCP that had two PCIe cards (X800XTPE and 6800U) running on the same board? It worked to my memory. It may have been a link on the front page now that I think of it (by link I mean link to another website).
 
I have a 6800gt and an ATI capture card that work flawlessly together... guess i'm just lucky?

:D
 
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