A dozen drivers for HD4670, and which do I choose?

[ImWolf]

I'm about to swap out my Nvidia for another old ATI graphics card. Apparently, quite a few manufacturers produced an "HD4670", and there are just as many drivers to choose from. The AMD site offers a "AMD_Catalyst_13.4_Legacy_Beta_WinXP.exe" for download (whatever Catalyst is?), and also a "ATI HD4670 13-1-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql.exe" file depending on how you navigate through their mess of a website.

From other webbies I also found;
"13-12_xp32_dd_ccc.exe"
"ATI HD4670 14-4-xp32-64-dd-ccc-pack1.exe" (and Pack2 and 3 files for newer OS's)
and many, many more....

Some of the files I downloaded are archives, but most are executable.

My particular card has a big ATI sticker on the fan, and the little sticker on the back says:

PN 288-DE101-440BD
1G DDR3 PCI-E HDMI/DVI/VGA

This image is very close to what I have on the bench. The fan has a 2pin plug directly into the GPU.

So what would be the safe driver package to go for on my old XP32 Pro system?

 

[Deleted member 245263]

thats very easy

 

[ImWolf]

thats very easy

I've been told and read now, that this GPU is well supported by the Linux Mint 22.1 Installed here. On the other hand, folks have had problems with Windows drivers. Can you please post a link to the above snapshot?

 

[VuurVOS]

Can you please post a link to the above snapshot?

Looks like an AI answer.

On the other hand, folks have had problems with Windows drivers

Here you have some drivers which you can download:

HIS HD 4670 IceQ 1GB (128bit) DDR3 PCIe < Download | HIS Graphic Cards

https://archive.org/download/ati-catalyst-11.12-xp-vista-win-7.7z/ATI%20Catalyst%2011.12%20XP_Vista_Win7.7z/11-12_xp32_dd_ccc_enu.exe

 

[ImWolf]

I swapped out the GPU's about 5 hours ago, and haven't had any luck with display driver yet. There are now a dozen failures in the recycle bin, and 2 more duds yet to be moved there.

I've tried versions from 11-12 thru 14-4 and always get the BSOD after reboot except for the last one I tried. V.13-4 did not BSOD because all it installed was that Catalyst garbage and no driver!

A lot of these packages cause Windows to find a "High Def. Audio Device" as well, but then when I point directly at the embedded drivers, Windows says it can't find the software.

I hadn't seen a BSOD in probably 20 years till I played with that GPU-Z program, and now every ATI display driver I try to install. Is AMD the keystone cops of display drivers or what???

 

[ImWolf]

Since I keep getting the same Page_Fault error, is ATI trying to load data into a specific area of Ram that another process has already staked a claim on? Or could it be using the Windows Pagefile instead? (mine is on a Fat32 drive even though Windows is installed on an NTFS drive).

At first I was installing the entire package, but I got tired of uninstalling those so I switched to just extracting the package and trying to install the driver through Device Mgr. (also tried just double clicking the INF file.)

It's bed time here......

 

[VuurVOS]

Did you try to use an older version of DDU to remove the driver remains?

Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) V18.0.0.4 Released ! - Wagnardsoft Forum

 

[Fouquin]

For WinXP you want to use anything from 10.2-11.10 or just 12.1, ignore all the later Catalyst releases. Earlier releases back to and including 9.1 can also work but you don't want to go back too far because you'll end up rolling back API feature support and major bug fixes on those older driver versions.

The AMD site offers a "AMD_Catalyst_13.4_Legacy_Beta_WinXP.exe" for download (whatever Catalyst is?), and also a "ATI HD4670 13-1-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql.exe" file depending on how you navigate through their mess of a website.

Decoding releases is pretty simple and straightforward; Catalyst is the software suite, sometimes also referred to by the name of the utility Catalyst Control Center (CCC), and the number is the year and month of the driver build. 12.1 is January 2012, as an example. Just like NVIDIA at that time had ForceWare, then a release number. One of the above, 13.4, is the last official patch driver version but it was only released with beta status since it only contains minor patches for HD 4000 series cards. 13.1 is the last official full driver build for that generation, with the appropriate release signatures and such.

The problem you are going to hit on WinXP is NVIDIA's drivers are extremely unfriendly with everyone else's drivers, and their watchdog and configuration process will always start up and run before ATi's (atieclxx.exe) can. So NVIDIA is loading in and causing your ATi install to wig out and die. That's 99% of the BSOD right there. The remaining 1% might be related to toolbars/accessories you may have installed already, such as nTune.

Did you try to use an older version of DDU to remove the driver remains?
Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) V18.0.0.4 Released ! - Wagnardsoft Forum

Do this immediately, wipe out BOTH the NVIDIA drivers and whatever half-loaded ATi drivers you've tried slamming through the system. Start fresh, and go install 11.10 as your starting driver. Once that works you can either stop poking at it, or if there's a specific desire to use later 12.x release drivers for some reason you can go grab 12.1.

 

[ImWolf]

Did you try to use an older version of DDU to remove the driver remains?

Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) V18.0.0.4 Released ! - Wagnardsoft Forum

Nope. Came across it in earlier reading, but the links always took me to a version that required Win7 x64 or greater. But I did D/L and check this older file. Even though I had uninstalled the Display Device and the Audio Device that Windows keeps adding to the hardware list in Device Manager, and used “Add or Remove Programs” to remove any current Catalyst software, and manually removed any folders left over, and ran CCleaner to clear out the registry, for both AMD and Nvidia remnants, and rebooted more times than I can count now, I did run this older version in both Safe Mode (first), and then again in Normal boot. Same result both times.

For WinXP you want to use anything from 10.2-11.10 or just 12.1, ignore all the later Catalyst releases.

I have yet to find a driver download that does NOT include the Catalyst stuff. Including all 3 versions you just mentioned.

Some of these driver packages don’t even install anything. On one of the packages I ended up with an empty install directory. On others it would install files, but no shortcuts anywhere, and when I ran any of the .exe’s from the install directory nothing at all would happen.

Of all the packages I’ve installed via the Setup.exe, only 2 of them offered to actually install a driver from the (custom) install list. Instead they offer Catalyst Manager, Hyperdrive, a free game, and of course Audio drivers for the video card. Next year I guess they’ll have video drivers for the printer too?

The only things I can imagine might be an issue is the fact that I’m using a Pagefile, (which should not be a problem at all), or the PAE extension used so that Windows uses all of my Ram.

After all the drivers I’ve installed for various devices since XP came out, I have never seen such trouble with a simple task as this. Maybe the video card itself has issues, but the 800x600 resolution (which I’m getting quite sick of) seems to be doing fine.

 

[Fouquin]

I have yet to find a driver download that does NOT include the Catalyst stuff. Including all 3 versions you just mentioned.

They are all Catalyst. That's the name of both the distribution and the control center. If you don't want Catalyst Control Center, don't install it, just deselect it from the advanced install menu. You won't find any driver download that is not called Catalyst; that is quite literally the name of that series of drivers just as Crimson was in 2016 and Adrenalin is now.

This is not a terribly difficult task on its own, and I'm starting to wonder if you have done something to your install in the past that is breaking things, or perhaps you aren't running a properly updated install of XP, maybe SP2? Maybe missing later .NET? But even Catalyst 10.2 works on a stripped SP2 without any complaint, it's only the Catalyst Control Center itself that requires any later updates (which, again, is an optional install and not required).

If the older versions of DDU that support XP are crashing than you are likely missing something critical.

Some of these driver packages don’t even install anything. On one of the packages I ended up with an empty install directory. On others it would install files, but no shortcuts anywhere, and when I ran any of the .exe’s from the install directory nothing at all would happen.

Any time you don't see the 'ATi Driver' in the setup screen it is because either your card is not correctly initialized (code 10/code 43) or not supported by that driver. However, every single version of Catalyst that I listed does support the HD 4670. I'm curious to see your download history because I can't fathom how you've ended up with so many drivers that don't support your card. Pulling on random .EXEs also won't install a driver, you need the setup utility to do its thing or you need to go through Device Manager, choose to install your own driver manually, tell it you have the disk, and point Windows to the directory that the driver was unpacked into.

I've run HD 4000 series cards in XP a bunch of times over the years, usually with Catalyst 9.1 or Catalyst 10.2 by personal choice, and they just work.

 

[ImWolf]

My D/L history clears when the browser closes, and I had also emptied the trash once along the way, but here are the packages still on my system. All of them behaved differently, and of course none of them gave me joy.

ATI HD4670 14-4-xp32-64-dd-ccc-pack1
13-12_xp32_dd_ccc.exe
AMD_Catalyst_13.4_Legacy_Beta_WinXP
XP_8.582-090203a-075908C-ATI.zip
13-9_xp32_dd_ccc_whql
ATI HD4670 13-1-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql
13-1-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql
XP_8.911-111025a-128241C-ATI.zip
11-12_xp32_dd_ccc_enu
10-2_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu.exe

I have .NET Framework v1.1 thru 4.0 (with updates and hotfix’s) installed. This was an XP Pro SP3 install, and then (about 5 years ago) I “updated” with the “Unofficial Windows XP SP4”. So the system should have any and all updates MS ever put out for this OS.

I’ve always used the Custom Setup, and tried to install only the display driver, but on most of the packages, there wasn’t a display driver in the list. And from memory, most of them had the “Catalyst Manager” grayed out so I had no choice on that.

It doesn’t make sense that so many of these driver packs would fail, but I’m not alone. I’ve read about others who have had similar experiences. Unfortunately, none of those threads were marked Solved.

There’s a conflict happening somewhere, and I’m not quite done looking for it, but this is becoming frustrating.

Fouquin said:

Fouquin said:


I've run HD 4000 series cards in XP a bunch of times over the years, usually with Catalyst 9.1 or Catalyst 10.2 by personal choice, and they just work.

UPDATE:

Since our previous exciting episode, I performed some time consuming activities.

I ran System File Checker. Even though the XP Pro install disc was in the drive after the first request, the SFC asked for it about 8 more times during that lengthy process. I would just hit the Retry button each time. There is no log file of what happened, but since I didn’t see anything weird I’ll assume any corrupt or missing files in the DLL Cache had been restored.

Then I ran “chkdsk c: /f /r /x”. Looking at the screen every so often I did not see any errors or fixes applied. As with SFC, there’s no log file.

DDU still crashed in both Safe & Normal mode.

Got into Msconfig > Services, and prevented all the non-Windows services from starting. After reboot DDU still wouldn’t run.

Then I reset Msconfig > Services back to normal, and edited my boot.ini file removing the PAE addon: “/kernel=ntkl64g.exe /hal=hal64g.dll”, which basically restored boot.ini to it’s original state. Still no joy with DDU.

Booted into Safe Mode again and ran Malwarebytes again…. No threats detected on full scan. I wanted to also run CCleaner, but for some reason it didn’t want to run is Safe Mode. So I rebooted into “Safe mode w/ Dos Prompt” to try it again. A dialog popped up saying “A device is missing” (or something close to that).

So now I booted back into normal mode, and this is when things got strange!

First thing on the desktop is an open Windows Explorer app focused on the Program Files\Nvidia folder. I know damn well I had deleted that folder long ago and double checked that it was indeed gone. (I think I even emptied the trash after this). So I deleted it again, and then ran CCleaner to remove Registry junk.

On reboot, (as always) comes the “Found New Hardware”. Instead of Canceling like I had been doing so many times, I let it run in Auto. It asked for one “File not found”, so I manually pointed to the Setup files still extracted, and it completed the install. Thing is, I didn’t look as hard as I should have, and I pointed to the “Packages\Display” files when this was the “High Def. Audio”. Oh well.

Then pops up the “Found your ATI Graphics card too”….. I let it run in Auto as well, pointed to the Display drivers location, but that wasn’t good enough. Along the way it asked for 3 files that weren’t at that location, but buried in a Windows\System32 sub-directory. I had to use File Manager Search to look for them, and in every case there were more than one. They were different sizes and dates, so I picked the file closest to 2010 (or newer) since this was supposed to be a v.10.2 install. The install completed, and I rebooted expecting to once again see the BSOD. But that didn’t happen.

Windows booted normal, no new hardware was found, and Device Manager showed both of those devices installed with no yellow exclamation marks anywhere. Clicked on the desktop > settings, still stuck with 800x600 max. resolution!

After this, I again edited boot.ini to see if that made any difference, and got the BSOD. So had to revert that back to original state again and Windows started normal.

So at the moment I have installed drivers that have improved scrolling and dragging quite a bit, but that’s it. The current drivers are;

Display: 8.911.0.0
HDMI Audio: 5.18.0.5509

"Add or Remove Programs" now shows ATI Catalyst Install Manager, but no shortcuts anywhere.

I also noticed that there is now a “Program Files\ATI” directory. (maybe it showed up when that Nvidia zombie directory happened? I’ll attach that directory listing for you guys amusement. I'm not sure I could repeat the above "install" if I had to, so what to do next?

 

[VuurVOS]

I think your Windows XP installation is f*cked up and needs a fresh install.

 

[ImWolf]

I think your Windows XP installation is f*cked up and needs a fresh install.

I have been known to "play" with a lot of software over the years, and most of it gets uninstalled when it wasn't what I expected. Thus, your theory is not so outlandish.

I've yet to meet a version of Windows that did not require the eventual "start over". On the other hand however, I've had almost zero issues with the OS until I decided to swap Nvidia GPU for ATI.

 

[VuurVOS]

I have been known to "play" with a lot of software over the years, and most of it gets uninstalled when it wasn't what I expected. Thus, your theory is not so outlandish.

I've yet to meet a version of Windows that did not require the eventual "start over".

An operating always collects garbage overtime. Fresh install is required in your case since the operating system is fucked up too much.
Fouquin suggested this yesterday as well.

 

[ImWolf]

An operating always collects garbage overtime. Fresh install is required in your case since the operating system is fucked up too much.
Fouquin suggested this yesterday as well.

Nobody can argue that a fresh install doesn't improve things, but if it was that easy people would be doing it more frequently. On this office machine I would be looking at wiping the drive, installing the OS, then updating a lot, then installing device drivers, then at least 50 3rd party programs, and then re-setting up all the networking with the other machines. And I'm sure I left a few things out.

Being the impatient grumpy old man that I am, I decided to get into that ATI directory instead, and hit that Setup.exe. At the end of that process it installed the Catalyst Control Center, and a slightly older display driver than what was listed prior. And on reboot, nothing went wrong.

I'm still putting it through the motions, but my first reaction is a bit sad. I have the resolution set for the same I've been using with the Nvidia GPU / software, but with ATI everything appears a bit smaller and slightly fuzzy. Time will tell if I leave well enough alone, or attempt to upgrade to a newer version and possibly be worse off.

 

[ImWolf]

Any time you don't see the 'ATi Driver' in the setup screen it is because either your card is not correctly initialized (code 10/code 43) or not supported by that driver.

I have never seen the "code 10/code 43" in device manager, no matter how I changed the current display driver to a different one. There have been times however, when I switched to test a different driver, and the Windows Settings would only allow VGA resolution choices topping out at 800x600.

If I were to completely remove the current driver and all the associated software (DDU v.16.0.0.1 is working on my system), and then install only the embedded driver in the "12-1_xp32_dd_ccc.exe" package, should the Windows Settings then offer me all the resolutions supported by my monitor?

Currently, I do have the 12-1 driver installed, but I chose to also install the CCC and some other options. This ended up being a lot of useless bloatware that left me with a slew of "information" errors in Event Viewer, and slowed the boot cycle down quite a bit too. I then disabled some of the features from loading, which did cut the boot time in half, but overall performance is still slower than I had with the former Nvidia GPU setup.

I'd eventually like to get back to being able to load the ''Gamersky-WindowsXP_64G_RAM'' patch, which gave me a much quicker system. Ever since I started messing with the ATI card and software, every attempt to load the patch first has resulted in BSOD. (The Pagefile isn't performing as well).

 

[eidairaman1]

Nobody can argue that a fresh install doesn't improve things, but if it was that easy people would be doing it more frequently. On this office machine I would be looking at wiping the drive, installing the OS, then updating a lot, then installing device drivers, then at least 50 3rd party programs, and then re-setting up all the networking with the other machines. And I'm sure I left a few things out.

Being the impatient grumpy old man that I am, I decided to get into that ATI directory instead, and hit that Setup.exe. At the end of that process it installed the Catalyst Control Center, and a slightly older display driver than what was listed prior. And on reboot, nothing went wrong.

I'm still putting it through the motions, but my first reaction is a bit sad. I have the resolution set for the same I've been using with the Nvidia GPU / software, but with ATI everything appears a bit smaller and slightly fuzzy. Time will tell if I leave well enough alone, or attempt to upgrade to a newer version and possibly be worse off.

Adjust refresh rate

 

[Apocalypsee]

Nobody can argue that a fresh install doesn't improve things, but if it was that easy people would be doing it more frequently. On this office machine I would be looking at wiping the drive, installing the OS, then updating a lot, then installing device drivers, then at least 50 3rd party programs, and then re-setting up all the networking with the other machines. And I'm sure I left a few things out.

Being the impatient grumpy old man that I am, I decided to get into that ATI directory instead, and hit that Setup.exe. At the end of that process it installed the Catalyst Control Center, and a slightly older display driver than what was listed prior. And on reboot, nothing went wrong.

I'm still putting it through the motions, but my first reaction is a bit sad. I have the resolution set for the same I've been using with the Nvidia GPU / software, but with ATI everything appears a bit smaller and slightly fuzzy. Time will tell if I leave well enough alone, or attempt to upgrade to a newer version and possibly be worse off.

My rule of thumb using driver of these old cards is use the one in the middle of the when the card first released and the last driver supported. In case of this card, it was released in 2008 and last driver is in 2013, look for driver in 2009-2011 (like being suggested by Fouquin), or if you want to play specific game in mind, look for when that game is supported and download the one or two revisions after that. The last supported driver usually won't work as well as comes prior because they try to pack all legacy cards into one package, of course there is something going to be left behind.

Sometimes the Catalyst Control Center don't play well with XP I just didn't know why at least by my experience. Try to use ATi Tray Tools instead.

What did you use to connect to your display? VGA? DVI?

 

[ImWolf]

Yesterday I removed the existing 12-1 driver/software, and installed 9-1 instead. This is the first time I know for sure that after I manually installed just the driver thru Device Manager that an ATI driver offered me the resolutions supported by my monitor through Windows Settings. (there was no CCC installed).

The reason I ended up at this forum in the first place was because of the possible need to flash this GPU Bios after install. As it turns out however, the card is as silent as the previous Nvidia passively cooled card was, and there's no need for me to do anything about that.

I can't be 100% sure, but I do believe that I originally purchased this ATI card long ago, and retired it to the stash for reasons I don't recall now. In that case, the Bios would be original since I have never dealt with flashing a GPU Bios. At the moment, the only issue I'm having is with the ATI drivers. When I was between drivers yesterday and was using only the Windows "VGA Compatible" driver, I was able to boot into Windows with the "PAE 64Gb Patch" working fine. But after I installed just the ATI driver I got the BSOD again and had to boot with just the 3.25Gb of Ram. This has been the case with every ATI driver I've tested thus far.

There's an obvious difference on how ATI and Nvidia load their drivers into memory, and I really wish I could figure out where the conflict is with Ram Patch since the system is noticeably slower without the extra Ram access.

​

 

[Apocalypsee]

You use an unapproved 64GB patch and blame on ATi driver

 

[ImWolf]

You use an unapproved 64GB patch and blame on ATi driver

Yes. I'm not sure how many unapproved applications I have installed on various machines. One of them however is the 64Gb Patch which has presented zero issues in the last 10 years..... until I introduced ATI drivers to the system.

The ATI driver packages also added a "ACEEvent Log" under Event Viewer, which (with every driver install except the current one), filled up quickly with errors, and "informational" errors of things not loading correctly, or inability to update. (I turned off Windows Update long ago). So I also blame this on the ATI drivers/software.

Luckily, the web is riddled with thousands of complaints and fixes posted by AMD/ATI customers, so I learned how to disable most of the nags that the previous driver installs had left me with. The only one that still persists, is not allowing me to use all the installed Ram on the machine.

 

[pavle]

13.4 Legacy ßeta is good. I use these for my HD 3870 on WinXP.