ATI 3870 being reported as X1900 series card

[Jer]

Hi,

First of all my rig:

ASUS Commando
Core 2 Duo E6600
3 Gig Kingston PC6400 RAM
Sapphire 3870
Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeMusic
2 320 Gig Seagate SATA II Drives
1 500 Gig Seagate SATA II Drive
Lite-On DVDRW LH-20A1S
GCE-8400B CD-RW
Antec TruePower Trio 650 Watt PS
Antec 900 Case
Vista Ultimate 32 bit SP1 V .744

I've had a problem with my Vista Ultimate since I un-installed my old X1950
XTX (used driver cleaner and deleted all things ATI + Registry First Aid to
clean that). I got a new ATI 3870 and installed it and then the newest CCC
and driver which was 7.12. I noticed that the CCC reported the card as a 1900
series (no DX10 support) so I did some fiddling around and moved my card to
the 2nd PCI-E X4 slot and re-started my machine. The hardware installer
picked up the move and installed the correct driver (3800 series). I then
moved my card back to the X16 slot and the card was seen as a 3800, and
worked correctly (DX10 yay!). I have had the same problem with the last two
CCC's (8.1 and 8.2). I've been in touch with ATI support and have tried
everything suggested but it still does the same thing and frankly they're
stumped as well. I have the newest BIOS and drivers (chipset as well) but it
all comes back to the CCC seeing the card as a 1900. ATI says that there is
something in Vista that's causing the problem because they only use the tools
in Vista itself to find the hardware information. I tried the new GPU-Z and
it sees the card correctly so it must use some other way to do the reporting.

Has anyone else seen this problem? If not can anyone point me in a direction
to take? I've been working on this for 2 months so any ideas would be most
appreciated.

Thanks.

Jerry Woolsey.

 

[flambe]

My guess is that there is still a setting in the registry that is causing
this.
Registry dleaners tend to find only the obvious trash in the registry that,
truth be told, is really not affecting much of anything.
You can manually search the registry for references to the older video card
or driver but make a backup copy of the registry or create a system restore
point first. However the actual references could be in hexadecimal and
uninterpretable.
As you have developed a work around I do not think that reformatting and
reinstalling the OS is worthwhile but that is the only way to completely
rewrite the registry.