Changing From Nvidia to ATi - precautions?

[DarkPacMan77]

First of all, please no fanboy jibberish in this thread. I'll explain my choice later in the thread for those interested though.

Anyways, I've ordered an ATi card and I currently have a Nvidia one. I know I'll have to uninstall the Nvidia drivers and install the ATi ones, however, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I don't want to cause any harm to my system. Is there a particular set of steps that should be taken in order to swap from Nvidia to ATi or am I worrying too much? I'm on Windows 7, and it auto-installed my Nvidia drivers, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to just uninstall the Nvidia ones, hook up the ATi card, and then power on and have it install and be fine upon next restart or not.

Why I've chosen to go from Nvidia to ATi?

I bought the AMD Phenom II X2 Callisto 3.1ghz dual core processor and I used a motherboard to unlock it. I got the MA790X-UD4P and using an updated BIOS I was able to use Advanced Clock Calibration and EC Firmware and change my dual core into a quad core, and since it's a black box processor, I was able to overclock this baby to faster speeds than any other AMD processor on the market (at stock).

I have an 8800gt 512mb from EVGA and I am looking to upgrade. I can get about $100 on eBay for my card so I'm going to sell it while I can and since I got this particular motherboard, I can't do SLI on here - only CrossfireX. So I've decided to swap out to the 4890 since it's the fastest single-GPU solution from AMD at the moment. I don't like the 4870x2 cards because I don't like multi-GPU cards, and the 4890 1gb is about 10% faster than the 4870 1gb across the board, while being just a tad bit more powerful than the GTX 260 core 216 from Nvidia.

So there, no fanboy rubbish please

[Force Flow]

If you're replacing a video card in your system:

Go to the device manager, and under "display adapters" remove all nvidia-related items.

Shut down, remove the nvidia card, install the ati card, and boot up. When windows loads, install the ATi drivers.


If you're installing fresh (new installation of windows), just download the appropriate drivers for the card and O/S and run the installer.