Ok im not completely sure if the card is good or not but i bought it off a friend who had it working a month ago so i think it should be..
And sorry im not at home atm some cant exaclty remember the specs, but its something like
8750 x3 core AMD
650W Awyun 48A PSU
Asus Mobo
4GB Ram
1TB Harddrive
3850 WORKING card\
and the 4890 freezing on "Starting Windows" card
Well yea thats the basics
Cheers
Well I suggest you find out if that card is working properly or you going to wind up chasing your tail 'round in circles.
Obviously the 3870 is working, so that says there's nothing wrong with the system. Also for what its worth I had a 4890 working rather well on a Antec 550watt power supply for a little over a year. So you 650 is plenty of power.
Again, check that the card is working.
Good luck.
With the 3870 in place - UNINSTALL the current ATI drivers and then use DriverSweeper in Safe Mode to clean the remnants.
Then replace the 3870 with the 4890 and install the drivers.
Where the hang is occurring is around the time time the generic video driver hands over to the ATI drivers. That's why the 4890 also works in safe mode, because it's using the generic VGA drivers.
The drivers may be the same, but when you add the existing CCC settings and all the different registry entries/switches into the mix for two different series of cards, you have a recipe for 'bugger' - it's not working
If after cleaning the drivers it still doesn't work - then you have to consider the card may indeed be faulty.
Sorry guys been busy for the past 2 days
Anyways found out what the problem was, I got my friend to bring over his download of the ATI driver and installed that using the 3870 after driversweeping
So then when i put the 4890 back in, it didnt freeze at Starting windows but instead showed a black screen afterwards
Which i later found out to be fixed as easy as doing this - Taking the power cable out of the monitor, leaving the DVI connected to both the monitor and card. Then when the computer is fully booted up(tell from the sounds) plug it back in. So as simple as that the monitor got a signal and started working, crazy huh
Do you need to do that every time now?
What probably happened was that wit the power off, the card/driver could not talk to the monitor to find out what modes it supported and it just went with "generic" settings. But when powered, something about the monitors communication with the card/driver causes the driver to put it into a mode that the monitor cannot actually handle.
This has been a problem for a while about monitors giving incorrect data about their capabilities but it wasn't till Vista that the information was taken and used on every boot. (On vista and 7 you can change monitors after install constantly and it rearranges the desktop to fit on the fly, whereas on XP and earlier it did not).
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