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I’m pretty dumbfounded over some of the problems that my new Aluminum iMac has. It’s a beautiful machine, but straight out of the box, the printer that came with the computer doesn’t work with leopard and bootcamp installs the wrong drivers for the graphics card. iChat video simply doesn’t work with other leopard machines and parallels crashes often. I will chronicle most of the problems I’ve solved as I’ve updated my apps to be Leopard compatible. This post is about the bootcamp drivers for the Radeon.
Apple has already released two firmware updates for the Radeon graphics card for OS X. These address stability and crash issues inside OS X. According to the specs, the 20 inch 2.4 Ghz processor Aluminum iMac has a ATi Radeon HD 2600 PRO graphics processor. In system profiler, it says ‘ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro’, chipset model ‘ATI,RadeonHD2600′. However after installing bootcamp and the leopard disc bootcamp drivers, windows says I have the “Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT’.
This is wrong! The video card is not an XT version and it is not a mobile laptop card. Out of the box, I get white noise and snow when *anything* animates (even a progress bar), symptomatic of the graphics card overheating or incompatible drivers. If you try and install the latest Catalyst driver, the installer fails. It also requires the Dot Net 2.0 framework, but still fails after you install it.
Well, I found a solution on the web here:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1017&message=24987376
It turns out the first steps are correct (download the dot net framework and grab the latest catalyst software suite). Then you need to force install the driver by right clicking on your video card in device manager and choosing update driver. You choose don’t connect to windows update / don’t search / install from a specific location / have disk and then go to the catalyst install driver, ATI > Support > Windows XP > Driver, and choose the inf file. There, you force it to install a driver for ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro instead of the Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT. You ignore all the warnings and install and reboot and it works great! No more snow and half life 2 episode 2 runs great (though I had to disable the windows firewall to let me download it and it took a couple tries).

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