NFII Ultra Infinity & RADEON9600XT drivers?

I am installing a new hard drive in my son's computer and would like to know what the recommended drivers are for his system. In the past, he tried some of the newer ATI Calalyst drivers and found that they didn't work smoothly with his system.
He has a DFI NFII Ultra Infinity MOBO, a Radeon 9600XT video card and an AMD Athlon 2500+ Barton CPU.
He has the Infinity Utility CD nForce2 Ver. 001 CD and the ATI Radeon ATI_101703B CD, that came with the hardware. Should he just install those CDs or use updated drivers? DFI recommends these drivers: NF_510_XP2K.zip & USB2-NF3-222.zip for their MOBO. If anyone is familiar with this setup, please let me know what is recommended at this time. I think the newer Catalyst drivers may address the newer MOBOs, but may not help the older ones.

 

Hi Barry, go ahead and install the ATI Catalyst 8.4 drivers, they work very well with this card. I run a AMD XP2600+ on a Gigabyte mobo with this card and installed the 8.4 drivers to run it on a 22" wide LCD in DVI mode and it runs A1 no worries. You find them here:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp

 

I appreciate knowing it works, but is it truly the ideal driver for this setup? I wish there was some type of evaluation of drivers in different settings. I ran across this information from someone:
"Speaking of driver performance. From Catalyst 5.5 to 6.4 I had a change of points in 3DMark05 like this (For my Radeon Power Color 9800 Pro 256MB)

Catalyst 5.5 - 2701 p
Catalyst 6.4 - 2890 p
Catalyst 8.3 - 2860 p
and now
Catalyst 8.4 - 2847 p

So even with the old cards the performance and points go up and down. I mean I would expect ATI/AMD to release drivers that not necessarily improve performance but leave it as it is if no changes are announced. Dropped performance is not what one would expect to see over time"

So, based on this information, what does 8.4 offer older cards that wouldn't be available on the 6.4?

 

Hello Barry,

You notice that an older, but not original, version of the drivers works better with your older graphics adapter? That's probably right, the best drivers for your video card were probably released a few months after the card was on the market.

"9600XT video card ", ATI sell mostly to OEM graphics adapter manufacturers. Find out who made the graphics adapter and look to find drivers from their website.

Get updates for the chipset drivers, they "oversee" the graphics drivers.

Matt

 

I had a few problems with the older driver displaying in DVI mode ( can't remember what version) so I then installed the new one 8.4 and it picked up my Monitor in DVI mode instantly like I mentioned I also use a socket A mobo with a AMD 2600+ CPU with the ATI Rad.9600 XT.
I also use a USB HDTV Receiver to watch Digital TV record TV edit recorded TV and never had a problem with this card using the 8.4 drivers.

 

Thanks for the input. The site reports that 8.4 is right for the 9600XT, though I hear of inconsistencies people have with newer drivers on older cards. My son didn't like the drivers that he last tried. I believe it was in the 7 series, if not the 8 series, so he wants to try 6.11, which he hopes to be more stable in his computer. He is more concerned about stability in creating 3-D graphics/animation and normal computer use than in playing games. If it doesn't work, he can always update to the 8.4. I appreciate your perspectives.