ATI Radeon X850 XT works without drivers, but shows artifacts with them

[skablaw]

Well this one has me completely stumped. A friend gave me his old Sapphire Radeon X850 XT after upgrading to a new card, so I threw it in my rig. After installing the latest version of Catalyst, I tried demoing a couple of WMV HD videos just to see if everything was tip-top. Well, I got a mess of snow and red and blue pixels - the kind of artifacts you'd expect when things are getting a little too toasty inside.

I tried reinstalling the card a couple of times, and one time I ran the WMV HD video BEFORE installing the card (XP detected its presence, but I didn't give it any drivers). Worked like a charm. Picture was crystal clear. Every time I install Catalyst, or just the bare display drivers, the thing goes haywire, but with no drivers it is just fine. Any idea what could cause such a thing? Should I try to find an old version of Catalyst or something?

Setup:

ASRock P45TurboTwins2000 mobo (P45 + ICH10)
Core 2 Duo E6550 2.4GHz
2GB DDRII - 667

 

[LookinAround]

My guess is two different drivers.

Is XP popping up the New Hardware wizard? Am guessing so and it's choosing diffferent drivers in the two cases.

When you uninstall the product it's uninstalling and removing/deleting the driver files for the one driver completely as well. So XP goes searching it doesn't find it for that case and chooses something different.

Look in Device Manager for both cases. Find the card under Display adapters. Rt click Properties and look at Driver tab.