[SOLVED]

Triple B

Google has yielded nothing that proved useful at all, so I am turning to you, my ever-knowledgeable PA kinsmen.

I recently ordered a new gaming rig, and everything was delivered by UPS earlier today. I finished putting it together, and when I got to installing the ATI drivers for my new crossfire setup, something...changed. I don't know exactly when or why it happened, but somewhere during the update process, the screen flickered, changed refresh rate, and came back on. Problem is, when it came back on, the display was much darker than it had previously been.

I've gone through every option I can think of (including using the actual buttons on the monitor to set the brightness/contrast to maximum), and I simply cannot get my brightness back. I'd say it's at least 25% darker if not more than it was before I installed the drivers. Naturally I also tried fiddling with the refresh rate, to no avail.

Has anyone ever heard of this before? I need HALP!

Hoz

Have you tried uninstalling then installing again the driver? Or rolling back to a previous version?

Triple B

Trying that now.

Also, would there be anything special I need to do to ensure the drivers are installed for both cards? It's detecting that I have two installed, but in the device manager, one of them is listed as "AMD Radeon HD 6870", and the other is listed as only "Radeon HD 6870". Would that make a difference?

Edit: Re-doing the drivers didn't help. How likely is it that my monitor is simply failing? I mean, until today, at that exact moment, I'd never had a problem with it.

Hoz

Driver isn't installed onto the cards, it's on the computer and it communicates with the cards. So you just install it once and the software package should detect crossfire or at least have options relating to it.

Triple B

That's what I thought. Everything with crossfire is working fine. I don't understand what happened.

bsjezz

have you checked power management settings of your windows account and graphics card interface? laptop or not, a lot of software has options for low power modes anyway and it could be misinterpreting your hardware as being in an unplugged state, or something else hinky

Triple B

...it's the goddamn ATI drivers.

I uninstalled them completely (through the device manager this time) and got my brightness back.

Now what the hell do I do? I need those drivers.

bsjezz

did you check the ati interface's power management settings?

Triple B

Seems to be okay now. Apparently I had to remove all evidence that the ATI drivers (Catalyst, etc) had ever been installed, and then start from scratch. Thanks for the help, guys. Mods can lock this.