Thinkpads Forum

I highly recommend anyone that has a system with an Ati chipset to use the latest drivers from Ati. The drivers available from Lenovo are pretty old and simply don't perform that well. In my T60p, there was a massive difference difference in gaming performance. In the T60 with X1400, it fixed the issue of the laptop not sending the correct signal over DVI at 1080p resolution to my Sony tv. I haven't checked the DVI issue with the T60p and Lenovo or Ati drivers yet, and didn't get a chance to check games with the X1400 using Lenovo drivers.

Installing Ati's drivers isn't straightforward though:

1. Uninstall the graphics drivers.

2. Use Drivercleaner to remove all of it from the system. Well worth the $10. http://www.drivercleaner.net/

3. Restart.

4. Download and install Catalyst package 9.3. It's the last revision that supports our chipsets. It's important that you download them from the link below. The ones that you get by normally navigating the AMD/Ati support/drivers section can't be installed because they can't be modded. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/w ... iw_xp.aspx

5. For whatever reason, drivers directly from Ati are crippled so that they won't directly install on Lenovo system. They must be modified first. Dl and install Mobility Modder to do this. Do not run the program yet. http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

6. A fix must be made to Mobility Modder for it to be able to work on Catalyst 9.2 and later. Download this and extract it to the place where the modder is installed. This will fix the problem that 9.2 and later driver infs can't be modified. http://www.drivercleaner.net/download/M ... xeBeta.zip

7. Follow the instructions in the main Mobility Modder page and proceed normally. http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

Hope this helps any of you enjoy the much better performance that your graphics card is capable of.

I do see that the driver on the ATI page is newer than that included in the Lenovo package. However, as I'm in a particularly overwhelming moment in my life, modifying the two programs which are necessary to utilize the newest package, 9.3, from ATI seems beyond me.

It would be cool if someone on the forum could do the modifications for 9.3, and then post it on the forum if that is legal.

So for the time being, and until I can muster up the energy and wit to do all of those modifications, I think I'm going to go ahead and install the package I have in order to get the Catalyst program, and at least upgrade my driver by another level or so.

If I do this, in safe mode as suggested, do I still need driver cleaner? Basically, being a lawsuit can make all purchases... even driver cleaner... onerous.

Thanks

taichi

My husband followed the sequence of your recommendations.

Installation of Catalyst 9.3 after the mod failed! Catalyst package 9.3 list ATI X1300. I've ATI X1400. May be that's the reason?


QUOTE:
"I highly recommend anyone that has a system with an Ati chipset to use the latest drivers from Ati. The drivers available from Lenovo are pretty old and simply don't perform that well. In my T60p, there was a massive difference difference in gaming performance. In the T60 with X1400, it fixed the issue of the laptop not sending the correct signal over DVI at 1080p resolution to my Sony tv. I haven't checked the DVI issue with the T60p and Lenovo or Ati drivers yet, and didn't get a chance to check games with the X1400 using Lenovo drivers.

4. Download and install Catalyst package 9.3. It's the last revision that supports our chipsets. It's important that you download them from the link below. The ones that you get by normally navigating the AMD/Ati support/drivers section can't be installed because they can't be modded. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/w ... iw_xp.aspx"

Marie-Ann, I'm not sure why that didn't work for you. I used that method several times when experimenting on my T60 (X1400) and T60p. Did you get any error message, what happened?

Taichi, I've never had to use Safe Mode to do this. It takes 30sec to mod the driver files, what's so hard about that.

Marie-Anne, the link in the original and last post is for XP drivers. If you're using Vista or 7, that's why it wouldn't have worked.

vinuneuro wrote:And here's Catalyst 10.2 for Vista and 7:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f2c8 ... 34329c7a5e

Marie-Anne, the link in the original and last post is for XP drivers. If you're using Vista or 7, that's why it wouldn't have worked.

Hi vinuneuro.

I have a t60 with an X1300 running windows 7 32bit. I thought I'd give this a try and install the latest ATI drivers. However, I have a couple of questions.

1. I thought that the last set of ATI drivers for the X1300 was in Catalyst 9.3. Does 10.2 actually support my ATI chipset?
2. I downloaded the 10.2/w7 files at your link. However, there doesn't seem to be enough there to do the install of Catalysts and the drivers. Am I supposed to download additional files? If so, which ones and where are they?

Thanks for your help,
Steve

Mobility Modder doesn't work for Catalyst 10.x. 9.11 and 9.8 have stability problems with PowerPlay (I guess they dropped unofficial support for mobile cards in the legacy drivers). OpenGL is broken in 8.12 (the one on Windows Update) and Lenovo's version (in different ways). I haven't tried 9.3.

The X1300 is just a lower clocked X1400.

Mobility Modder works fine for 10.2. That's what I'm using in Windows 7 right now. You have to use the legacy drivers though. 10.3 from their main/current download area is not modable. Also, step 6 in the original post is not necessary anymore. Here are the legacy drivers for vista/7:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/w ... ng=English

Are there any stability issues with PowerPlay in 10.x? It's not too big a deal either way. You can just disable it since 7/Power Manager has the same function built-in.

Hi Vinuneuro,

Well, the OS of my T60 is XP.
My husband tried to install the 9.3 driver after modding it (as instructed). Installing it failed. One of the problems was a message "missing MOM.Implentation file". By unchecking ATI Catalyst Control Panel in "msconfig", this annoying message disappeared.
We have no clue why the installation of the mod driver failed.
May be my buddy should give it another try in the forthcoming days.

Cheers, Marie-Anne

vinuneuro wrote:Marie-Ann, I'm not sure why that didn't work for you. I used that method several times when experimenting on my T60 (X1400) and T60p. Did you get any error message, what happened?

Taichi, I've never had to use Safe Mode to do this. It takes 30sec to mod the driver files, what's so hard about that. Here's 10.2 modded, just download he folder.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f2c8 ... 13f15c3e80

vinuneuro wrote:It's not too big a deal either way. You can just disable it since 7/Power Manager has the same function built-in.

I meant it's just not stable at anything but default clocks, period. Downloading 10.2 to test now...

And... it crashed within 5 minutes on Optimal Battery Life. I was playing this free game.

Vempele wrote:And... it crashed within 5 minutes on Optimal Battery Life. I was playing this free game.

I don't know what to tell you.. switched to Max Battery, played the game for a while etc. It's been perfectly fine for 15min now. My T60 has a X1400 fwiw.

switched to Max Battery

Do you mean you set Power Options->Edit plan settings->Advanced->ATI POWERPLAY(tm) Settings->Plugged in = Optimal Battery Life? Power Manager just copies the settings from whichever power plan was active when you installed it!

Mine is X1400 too.

This is what I did, no problems:

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/6681/powerplay.png

vinuneuro wrote:Mobility Modder works fine for 10.2. That's what I'm using in Windows 7 right now. You have to use the legacy drivers though. 10.3 from their main/current download area is not modable. Also, step 6 in the original post is not necessary anymore. Here are the legacy drivers for vista/7:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/w ... ng=English

Are there any stability issues with PowerPlay in 10.x? It's not too big a deal either way. You can just disable it since 7/Power Manager has the same function built-in.

Thanks for this thread. I'm going to try this with 9.3 and XP on both my X1400 15" and X1300 14" T60s.

The comment above about step 6 not being necessary anymore, does that just apply to Vista?

Thanks again. (I hope you're getting a commission from drivercleaner. )