Graphics card problem: Radeon HD 2600 XT

Upgrading my evga GeForce FX 5500 to the best AGP I could find at a good price:

Visiontek's Radeon HD 2600 XT

Followed instructions, clear old drivers with add/remove programs like nVidia likes. Power down, swap cards, reboot. Don't let XP plug n play, load drivers from CD. Problem is after I get the drivers on, for some reason XP is detecting another unknown PCI device (nothing in any of the PCI slots), and the 2600 XT doesn't seem to be running the graphics, seems like its still running on-board video. When I go to update the drivers for the card, the zip file downloads, extracts, starts the install wizard, then tells me no compatible hardware was found and stop install.

In device manager window, I'm seeing the 2600XT in display adapters, but also the horrible yellow ? for unknown PCI device further down the list (not in display adapters). I've tried forcing drivers on the unknown, but nothing takes. I've cleared all ATI drivers, updated mainboard drivers and reinstalled video drivers several times and no luck. I've tried skipping the whole Catalyst thing and just getting the video driver, I've checked and made sure DirectX is up to date. The drivers aren't XP signed, but I don't think that would make any difference.

At this point, I've cleared out all the ATI drivers, and swapped back to my FX 5500. Am I looking at bad drivers, bad card or imcompatibility with a slightly older comp?

In case it's not ez to see my comp. setup:
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2ghz)
1 gig RAM
MSI KM4M-V mother/mainboard (VIA chipsets)
600W power supply
Windows XP Prof. edit. w/ SP2

Please help before I throw the whole kit and kaboodle out the window and go buy the $1K worth of parts I've had on my newegg wish list.

*EDIT: reformatting isn't an option, I don't have OS disks.

 

Press the "DEL" key during bootup, to enter the CMOS Setup program, and look for an option to change the video device being used. Switch it from the onboard videoCHIP to the new videoCARD; remember to save your settings as you exit the CMOS Setup. The system will reboot, and should then begin working with the ATI videocard...

If that doesn't work, let us know, and we'll work from there...

 

I seem to remember something about when I installed my card, that because it has 2 video connections, the card would sometimes show up as 2 cards in the device manager.
Did you try switching to the other video output? Is there another setting in catalyst for disabling dual monitor mode?
Did you go into bios and disable onboard?
Under details of the unknown pci device what does it show? If it is acpi, thats an amd issue, nothing to worry about.

 

I've tried (tentatively) tinkering with the bios (changing priority to read from AGP, aperature setting to down 64 then up to 256) to no avail. I didn't see a disable onboard, but I'll look again. I did try switching to the other output, no change. I'll try putting catalyst back on and see about disabling dual monitor, but from what I remember the monitor 2 was grayed out as though it was disabled.

The details of the unknown really show me nothing I understand. I'm just puzzled as to why is shows up with the radeon card and not the nvidia.

I greatly appreciate the input, and I really should've said from the get-go that I'm at work atm, and not able to try anything right away.

One of the reasons I got the card was to play WoW with a better fps. When I try to open WoW, it goes black, flickers a couple times then gives me an error that it can't do the 3D (this is why I checked to make sure I had DirectX 9.0c). This problem might be that WoW doesn't have the card listed as compatible yet, but just browsing the internet the graphics are slow.

Even though I can't try anything right now, I work until 9 tonight so please leave more ideas as you have them, so I have a plan of attack when I do get back in front of this thing.

 

Well, FIRST THINGS FIRST; from what you've described, the onboard videoCHIP can't run anything in 3-D, which is to be expected; you need a quality videoCARD for that...

You might NOT find a way to DISABLE the onboard video; simply switching the system to boot from a DIFFERENT video source (IOW, your new videoCARD) should have the SAME effect, so don't confuse yourself by looking for a specific way to DISABLE the onboard videoCHIP.

Think of it this way; what would happen if an inexperienced user disabled his onboard videoCHIP WITHOUT having installed a videoCARD? Maybe nothing would go wrong; maybe the CMOS Setup would ignore the change if no videoCARD were installed, but it is ALSO possible that the system would disable the videoCHIP, and when the system was rebooted, there would be NO video device available to the system... Don't laugh, stupid stuff happens all the time, though CMOS / BIOS settings aren't as susceptible to user errors as they were fifteen years ago...

Just FYI, you should change the video aperture setting to match the amount of RAM on your new videocard; if you use onboard video, it is usually safe to set it to the lowest value allowed, unless you dedicate more system RAM to handle the video...

Bottom line is, I'm NOT going to advise you to do ANYTHING else, until we KNOW for sure whether or not you can get the videoCARD to work from the CMOS Setup program. Once we are POSITIVE you're working with the ATI card, we can work on reinstalling the proper drivers for your system...

To be honest, I'm not sure you've EVER had the video working properly with the old nVidia card, so we WON'T rush this; I'm sure you'd rather do it right the FIRST time, which will allow you to learn some new skills in the process, instead of trying fifty-three different methods, which will only confuse you AND us...

IOW, patience IS required to accomplish this, but once we get everything working properly, you should be able to use your game without a lot of heartburn...

 

Did you COMPLETLY remove the nvidia drivers first? You can use drivercleaner and remove ALL of your video drivers and then start over. Having both nvidia AND ati can cause problems.
Its usually a bad idea to switch from one manufacturer to another, because video drivers can be difficult to completly remove unless you know what you are doing.

 

If you do have onboard video I would try looking up the manuals on your motherboard on the methods to disable it. It could be that there is a jumper setting that bypasses it or it could be in the bios. Either way I wouldn't worry too much about it as you can usually always remove the cmos battery and fix it right up to normal again

Good luck
Josh

 

Here is a guide that may help you, I quickly glanced thru it.

http://www.playtool.com/pages/uninstallgraphics/uninstall.html

 

Well. I got home from work and uninstalled nVidia again, loaded the Radeon again. I did what I could with my BIOS to make sure I'm running the card not the chip, but I'm nowhere near advanced enough to start changing things haphazardly.

I'm still getting that unknown PCI device, but at least now it's listed with the card in display adapters (so it is probably the potential second display, which catalyst shows to be disabled). Still however, can't run WoW because it won't do the 3D. So I ran a dxdiag. No apparent problems until I ran the Direct3D test. Here's the results.

3D7 Test Result: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)
D3D8 Test Result: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086c (error code)
D3D9 Test Result: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086c (error code)

I know enough to know that a problem exists, but I don't know where to go from here.

 

Did you try to just install the base drivers that came on cd with the new hardware or did you immediately go to the web for updates

 

There are a lot of hardware that contains multiple components that will show up as unknown devices if the correct driver suites aren't installed

 

I had first used the disk. When that didn't work, I went straight to the website. That didn't work. What I did just find is that using a previous version of drivers did work (7.8 instead of 7.9). Funny thing is, it wouldn't detect a compatible hardware device and stopped install, but when I went into device manager and did "have disk" and forced the driver on it, it works!

There's a bit of lag still compared to the nvidia. Whether that will go away with tweaking or if that's just radeon I'll find out I guess.

The stupid unknown PCI is still there, but I just disabled it on device manager so it won't keep detecting it everytime I reboot.

Thanks all for the help. If you have more input or see I did something horribly wrong that's going to result in the failure of my mainboard, please let me know!

 

Try catalyst version 7.8, uninstall the driver again first though.

 

Did you look at what I mentioned before about the device? If you know the details, you can find a solution.

Under details of the unknown pci device what does it show? If it is acpi, thats an amd issue, nothing to worry about.

 

The device details are jibberish to me... PCI\VEN_1002&<a whole bunch of crap>