Problem with 9600xt..

-TooL

What would be the best drivers for a 9600 xt?

Im running into problems with an old Radeon 9600 XT on an Asus A7V motherboard. It has a apg pro/4x slot on it, all the system drivers are up to date. ATI.com shows the latest greatest catylist drivers as that cards driver, even tho its pretty old.

I rember when I used to have one myself, that the latest drivers were the WORST thing to put on it, and you needed an older driver set. I have forgotten what that older set is. 4.3 maybe?

Basicly the problem is this, I swapped out an radeon 8500. Installed the catylist drivers (latest ones), it rebooted, and locked up during the video test mode it does with new driver installs (including the login screen has a bunch of graphical garbage all over it, was able to log in, it started testing, bam, locked and the monitor signal got no signal). After hard reboot, I was able to get into windows, change resolutions etc. The video of the car in the control center does not show up, neither does the video in the video tab. Diablo 2's video test program detects nothing, and says the computer cant run it, fails with a direct3d rendering error. Any other graphical program doesnt run, or crashes after awhile (even heroes of might and magic 2, very graphical intensive!).

This card has a story to it as well. I had a 9600xt for a year or so and it failed on me. I bought a new card, and sent in the old one to ATI as an RMA. They tested the old one, found out it was bad, and was still under warrenty, sent me this "white box" card (brand new). I haven't touched it till now, installing it into a friends pc.

System specs:
AMD Athlon 1ghz on Asus A7V motherboard
~400 megs ram (1x256mb chip and 1x128mb) memtest stable 24hrs
Radeon 8500 swapped out for 9600xt
Seagate 40gig 7200 rpm drive ata100
3com network card
Sound blaster 16 card
Cheap-o lucent winmodem

PCI slot 2 and 1 open (2 = known irq problem with board, 1 = to close to video card)

>GSXR<mrbusa

What steps did you take when you swapped cards?

-TooL

Uninstalled the pre-r300 catylist drivers, including MMC using the "add/remove programs" in the control panel. After that, used catylistcleaner. Turned off PC, swapped cards. Turned on pc, installed the new driver, rebooted, it did the test, and locked up, hard rebooted, everything seemed fine except no 3d game would work, and even heroes of might and magic 2 would crash over time.

I since found that the 4.3 or 5.1 versions of the drivers were the most stable of it. Not a perfect solution. ATI always tweaks there drivers for the newest hardware, which sometimes hurts the older stuff. They have allready dropped the 9250 series and lower from the latest driver set. They should just go ahead and remove all 9xxx series, and create a stable driver specificaly for them and forget about them totally.