Widescreen Gaming Forum

Looks like bad news for me and the wife is gonna be pissed.

I had my setup running earlier today on my dual 4850's, I had to turn off crossfire but it worked to run all 4 of my monitors.

Newegg box came with my new HIS 5870 today!

It was bigger than I expected, had to remove my hdd cage, one of my hdd's and do some wire moving to fit it in there, it just barely clears some mobo stuff and my sound card.

Well I got it all hooked up and it booted no problem, only my two left monitors were on. But I figured I just needed to install the new drivers.

I had one 4850 for my HDTV and the 4870 connected to the 3x24" monitors (2 DVI, 1 DP)

I d/l and tried to install the drivers, about half way it said one of my gpu's had to be disabled because it is not compatible with the drivers, then the screen went black and never recovered.

I did a hard reboot and after bios and ms loading screen it went all black and never recovered. I waited and did a few reboots but never got in.

So took the 4850 out, and got into windows and then installed the drivers and they installed correctly.

Gave eyefinity a short trial and then powered down to install my 4850 back.

Booted up, got to login screen, all looked good then system crash and reboot, then back into black screen.

Looks like there s no way for me to use my 4850 in conjunction with the 5870 at least not with new drivers.

So now I took the 4850 back out and cant get into normal windows, I am in safe mode and the drivers wont install in safe mode, so may have to uninstall them and then go back into windows and do this all over again.

Really sucks :( So now my only hope is I can use the HDMI port and toggle it between one of the DVI connections for when we want to use the 37" screen for movies instead of one of the 24" monitors.

I get my HDTV mount tomorrow, so I guess that test happens then and I will post back.

Any word or info on if this is just a driver issue and it can be fixed or its a no hope situation would be very helpful.

Yep, hopefully it's just a driver compatibility issue - running a 5000 series together with a cheaper second card may be something I end up doing so I want them to play nicely as well.

Did you clean the drivers before initially installing the 5870? My bet is you got the computer confused. I see no reason why there should be any issue mixing cards as long as both cards are supported by the driver release. My guess it's the beta nature of all of this new stuff.

Did you clean the drivers before initially installing the 5870? My bet is you got the computer confused. I see no reason why there should be any issue mixing cards as long as both cards are supported by the driver release. My guess it's the beta nature of all of this new stuff.

Thats just it the new 5870 drivers are beta and only support the 5000 series, if I go install the 9.9 cats it will probably work with both cards as the older cat 8 I had installed did, however I would be losing what ever function the 5000 series gives me. My guess is eyefinity is one of those things.

Im good as long as I can toggle the 4th monitor as I only want to use my 3x24" for computer stuff, then toggle over to the 37" for movies and stuff. I do not need all 4 going at once.

Infact I would rather the 5870 be able to do this as that means I can run just 1 card instead of two saving me power/heat, and letting my mobo run that slot at 16x. Also I can sell the 4850.

I fooled around with it for about another 30 minutes ealier and never got back into normal windows.

In safe mode if I try to install or uninstall the drivers it says the identification driver failed to initilize so it wont work, no matter how many times I try to go into normal windows I just get a black screen. I had this issue before when I did a bios mod on my old 4850's causing a driver problem.

I'll probably have to use driver cleaner or similar in safe mode to manually remove the drivers, but every time I did that it caused a really annoying issue where when I go to install the new drivers it says the .inf file can not be found.

I was just going to do a system restore but for what ever reason when I clicked on my computer to go into the restore options the computer just froze up on me.

I had to give up for the day and get a couple of hours of sleep before coming to work.

Now I am at work I'll just have to sit tight and work on it more later.

Have you tried downloading 9.10 from someplace like Guru3D? I bet their inf files are for more generic installs.

9.10 drivers can be found here, supposed to be newer than the betas and RC drivers:
http://www.rage3d.com/BOARD/showthread.php?t=33953249

9.10 drivers can be found here, supposed to be newer than the betas and RC drivers:
http://www.rage3d.com/BOARD/showthread.php?t=33953249

Cool I will try them when I find a way to get back into windows to install them :D

The ATI download page has RC6 for there latest, that is what I installed, it says supported gpu "5870, 5850" but usually they retain backwards compatibility, lets home there is not some strange hardware difference in the new cards that prevents them from working along side an older card.

XP, Vista or Win7?... no chance on Linux/Unix?

Im using Vista Ult x64, I'll upgrade to Win 7 Home x64 soon as it comes out. I preordered it from Newegg.

Im using Vista Ult x64, I'll upgrade to Win 7 Home x64 soon as it comes out. I preordered it from Newegg.

If you are a student or have one in your family with an .edu email Microsoft is selling Win 7 Pro for $30 deal right now. There are a lot of news articles on it.

http://windows7.digitalriver.com/store/mswpus/en_US/

Yeah I do not know anybody unfortunately.

Does it ship now or is it also somewhat of a pre-order?

I think its OCT 10 for the release of the pre-orders made online.

Yeah I do not know anybody unfortunately.

Does it ship now or is it also somewhat of a pre-order?

I think its OCT 10 for the release of the pre-orders made online.

It's preorder iso download and $13 extra for a DVD hard copy.

[quote]Yeah I do not know anybody unfortunately.

Does it ship now or is it also somewhat of a pre-order?

I think its OCT 10 for the release of the pre-orders made online.

It's preorder iso download and $13 extra for a DVD hard copy.

Oh if its an .iso I would just burn it. The pre-order was $50 w/ free ship so its no terribly more.

If I come across a friend or somebody to buy the .edu version for me I'll get both so I can have a copy for my laptop too.

oh no, hopefully this is just a temporary glitch, as i will be connecting my 4th monitor to an extra 3870 once i get my 5870!!!

I got up and running, had a lot of issues today.

To get the new drivers installed I had to boot into safe mode and uninstall the old ones via device manager.

Thing is I thought my computer was crashing but what it was, was right clicking anything caused me to have a hang that never ended. So I think the drivers corrupoted my right click menu.

Once I figured out that part I was able to work around it and get back into windows and install the drivers.

It seems the new drivers broke my x-fi sound drivers?

I lost sound to my card, I unintalled the 5870 sound drivers and downloaded and installed the newest x-fi drivers.

It gave me sound back but at every reboot it was back to not working. At some point after a few reboots it decided to work.

I'll tell you the strangest thing. Not once so far since installing this card have I been able to shut down windows. I get the "windows is shutting down" screen but it never ends and I have to manually power down.

Im going to take one more shot at this, I didnt install anything this boot up, going to try to shut down and put the 4850 back in and see if I can get into windows.

Update: does not work and when you try it messes up all the drivers so you have to do the safe mode uninstall and reboot, reinstall, reboot thing.

Update: does not work and when you try it messes up all the drivers so you have to do the safe mode uninstall and reboot, reinstall, reboot thing.

awww man, not looking good, let us know if you can fix it somehow, your setup is exactly what i need

Im a pretty happy camper looks like you can at the software level toggle off one of your connections to support a 4th screen.

All I had to do was turn off eyefinity group, then right click my hdmi flat panel connection and select replace. After that it shows me 2 of my screens (the two dvi connected ones) and I pick the one to replace. That monitor goes off and the big screen came on.