Video problem on a Dell Studio XPS 435MT & new GTX1080

[cjanien]

I have a Dell Studio XPS 435MT. The original video card was an ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series. It was driving two Dell 27” monitors at 14400 for several years. Just recently the video has been a little unstable. Yesterday upon booting up the PC would only display 1600x1200 and would only mirror monitor one on monitor two.

After a lot of digging around I was able to force display of 14400 but could not get the second monitor recognized. I was still getting a mirror image on the second monitor. I tried various attempts to reload driver by disabling existing driver and rebooting — no luck.

With no real support for the ATI card and a bit of past video instability, I decided to upgrade the video card. Yesterday I installed an NVIDIA 1080 Founders Ed in the pc. Physically every thing seems to fit. I have a new PS with 500w and a split 6-2 power connector. The 1080 has an 8 pin socket. The 6-2 plug appears to pair physically to creat an 8 pin plug and it fits the 1080 socket.

I used both the dvi and hdmi>dvi outputs to connect to one monitor. Upon boot up I’m getting a screen with tearing top to bottom. Screen is unreadable. Not sure what to do at this point.

The pc has an Intel 920 i7 cpu, 24 gb ram, 1 tb ssd, 6tb hd, 500w PS. I realize that my pc only has PCIe 2.0 x16 but thought 3.0 was backwardly compatible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. TIA.

 

[cjanien]

Op sys Win 10 Pro.

Usage — Lightroom, Photoshop, minor video/time lapse production, MS Office, and a lot of web surfing and YouTube. No gaming at the moment.

PSU -- Antec Earthwatts EA500D 500w

 

[cjanien]

Removed GTX1080 and put the ATI 4800 back in the PC. Again, one 27" monitor working at 14400. Second monitor has no signal now and is not recognized in the Settings/Display window.

The pc was using Microsoft's basic video driver. I tried to unpack and load an ATI video driver that was on my PC. In the device Manager I'm getting a yellow warning triangle with the message -- Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware.The driver may be corrupted or missing (Code 39).

I'd like to either get the old ATI working as before or install the GTX1080 properly and get it to work. Ultimately I'd like to see a desktop spanning two 27" monitors at 14400 resolution (what I had two days ago).

 

[delrey]

First off, did you completely uninstall the ATI drivers before you installed the 1080? After that, did you install the latest drivers for your 1080?

Second, your computer is a little old for a 1080. I had some issues running a i7 960 computer with a 1060 GPU with some instability. The card runs perfectly fine on a newer setup.

Also, 500 watts is the bare minimum to run a 1080. So keep that in mind. Especially when the card is under load. You're probably going to have get a 600+ watt once you start gaming.

The age of the computer comes into mind. I honestly would find an older used GPU to run the dual monitors with your current setup and keep the 1080 for a new computer build for the future.

 

[cjanien]

I have uninstalled the video drivers in Device Manager. I'm not sure that is enough and thinking the files on disk should also be deleted. Is there a simple way to purge my disk of ATI an Nvidia drivers? Second, what drivers are appropriate for my PC to drive the 1080?

Any help with these two questions would be great!

Regarding the original ATI HD4800, I have found out that ATI does not have Win10 drivers for the HD4800 Series. The work around is to revert to Win8 and install those drivers then reboot into Win10. Without an ATI driver, Win10 will revert to the Microsoft Basic Video Driver which does not support multiple monitors and a host of other missing features. So apparently what has happened to my system is that Win7 drivers got carried thru to Win10. In the last few days something forced a driver change to MS Basic Video.

Regarding the age of the system, yes I am considering buying/building a new workstation. However I have to say the Core i7 920 still performs very well and is only 50%-70% slower than current mainstream i7 CPUs. I consider it a strong performed against current i5 CPUs. The SSD helps considerably. For the work I'm doing it has performed great. Recently I have tried to assemble time lapse movie clips using 3,000 raw 40mb images. The CPU and subsystems do struggle with this.

With LGA 1366 I could go to Core i7 980X or 990X Extreme Edition or Core i7-970 or Xeon 36xx or 56xx. These chips are 70% to 90% faster than the 920 and bring the old 435MT up to perhaps last years mainstream Core i7 performance levels.

The age thing is real more of a driver support problem from ATI and maybe a BIOS problem soon.

 

[delrey]

Use DDU to help completely remove older drivers. As far as the new nVidia drivers, go to nVidia's page and select Win 10 (32 or 64 bit), and the 1080. You should be good to go there.

I would not put anymore money into your setup than you have to. You are limiting yourself on more than the CPU by using it. I understand it performs well, like I said, I had a stable i7 960 system not long ago. And you will have PSU issues if you upgrade to the higher i7's with the 1080. Go to here to get an idea on how much power you will be using. It's higher than you think. I hope you can get your 1080 up and running to buy you time before you completely upgrade. Have fun.

 

[cjanien]

Delrey, you/re probably right. When you add in the USB3.1 or Thunderbolt 2, a new cpu, new graphics card, etc I'm basically building on a poor foundation. The incremental cost of a new MB, PS, and case is not that great. I guess I'm just a cheap New Englander who wants to wring every ounce of life out of the 435MT! Thanks for the reality check. BTW the power assessment is an interesting site. Thx.

 

[cjanien]

Solved the problem of ATI 4800 driver not allowing two 27" 1440p monitors in extended mode. I also had a problem with Logitech driver. Both units were flagged in the Device Manager. All of the problems started when WIN 10 self installed.

In trying to solve the Logitech problem I came across a suggestion regarding Windows Defender. Start Defender, go to Device Security, click on "Core isolation details", switch "Memory integrity" OFF, reboot.

Device Manager shows no yellow flags now. Driver for Display Adapters shows ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series, provider AMD, Driver Date 1/13/2015, Driver Version 8.970.100.9001. Previously, Microsoft's basic video driver was getting loaded not ATI.

Note there is a lot of discussion on the internet regarding this driver not working with WIN 10 with the solution being to force a prior driver to load. Apparently those discussions are incorrect. Driver 8.970.100.9001 correctly identifies the ATI 4800 and allows dual extended monitors in 1440p. This is pushing the ATI pretty hard so gaming or 1080p YouTube videos may be problematic, but Excel, Word, Edge all seem to work with no crashing so far!

Thanks to Delrey for his feedback. He was correct -- in the long run the solution is to get an up to date rig. Nevertheless, for anyone having trouble with Win10 and drivers I hope this helps.

PS Switching Memory integrity off probably has security issues by disabling a key Defender function that works with newer hardware. I will experiment with various option to see if the function or other functions can be activated yet maintain the drivers.