Windows – How to see the specifications of the Graphics Card before installing drivers in Windows 7

driversgraphics cardwindows 7

I have a ATI/AMD Dynamic Switchable Graphics on a HP Pavilion g7 (hp pavilion g7-1246ef). This computer came with a pre-installed Windows 7 64 bit OS. For some reason I had to use the Windows 7 32-bit OS and there are no 32-bit drivers for my computer (it looks like; they should be here).

I was able to install drivers, Aero works and so on, but the fans are loud, so that I would like to try and find some driver that will fix this…

I would like to know exactly what my VGA is called before installing any driver. Using Linux, I found that that I have practically two: one on-CPU Intel for energy-efficiency, one discrete card (an ATI/AMD Radeon HD 6470M) for rendering.

At some point in Windows it looked like so:

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and now it looks like so:

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Hardware ids:

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Best Answer

After trying different ways to install the drivers my opinion is that in order to see the hardware the system needs some kind of software/drivers. Removing all drivers completely makes the hardware inaccessible. In most cases Windows will try to install some minimal generic drivers as soon as it detects their absence. In some cases removing the drivers will make the display unusable (completely black) after reboot (it happened to me twice after removing the Intel drivers from HP; I had to boot in safe mode in order to use the display and install a driver; another solution was to use a rescue disk and from there to go back to a system restore point.)

So, the answer to the question is probably that without some drivers (at least the generic ones that come with the OS installation) there is no access to the hardware.

Also, accessing information on the hardware - its "specifications" - depends on the driver up to some point: using a driver intended for a Radeon (TM) HD 7400M GPU while I had Radeon (TM) HD 6470M displayed the wrong info that my GPU was 7400M. But even so (or, I imagine, with some generic driver) it was possible to see the hardware ID, which led to identifying the hardware (see images in the question and the comments made by and31415).

How To Find Unknown Device Drivers By Their Vendor & Device ID.

I cannot rule out the possibility of seeing some info on the graphics card in BIOS. That BIOS info is also visible in this way.

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