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Toledospod

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 5, 2020
26
24
Toledo, OH
Hi all,

Hoping someone can help me here. For a few years now, I've been running Windows 10 installed on an external SSD connected to my iMac Retina 5K 27" 2020 and its worked pretty well. I decided last week to get another external SSD and try installing Windows 11 onto it and run this though my iMac instead. Starting to regret this idea, but I'd love some input and advice on my issue.

Windows installed fine, so did the stock Bootcamp drivers I downloaded through MacOS (running Ventura at this time). Also ran Windows Updates several times and its pretty much up-to-date. I also ran Apple Software Update installed two of the four Bootcamp updates that were found. However, that's when I started having issues. I noticed that there wasn't any graphics drivers installed and it just had the Microsoft Basic video display drivers (which is terrible). My iMac has an AMD Radeon Pro 5300. So, I tried install the third Bootcamp update which stated that it included updated AMD and Intel drivers. After a reboot, no matter what I do, everytime I run Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge or really anything, my screen will flicker and then come back on, or sometimes it will flicker, go black and not come back on for a few minutes. In some cases, it even goes black and tries to redraw the display and it will look all weird like someone broke the display and all I can do is force shutdown and restart. In some cases while I was using Google Chrome , it would give me an "Aw, snap!" error page and state "Out of memory", which I assume to refer to video memory.

I have tried to remove the Bootcamp update and install the AMD drivers from stock Bootcamp drivers, but this also resulted in the same issue. I've also tried to install the latest September and October 2022 AMD Adrenalin Blue edition from "bootcampdrivers.com" - same result. Each time I run DDU in Safe Mode to remove the drivers before trying another driver. I've even tried to installed the same drivers that my Windows 10 install has (Version 27.20.14540.15002), which although works fine on Windows 10, has the same issue as the rest of the ones I've tried in Windows 11. I also tried to install just the drivers only from one of the latest AMD installers following a guide I found here - https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...n-the-latest-amd-drivers-in-bootcamp.2245324/ (no AMD software installer used so no AMD software, which is fine for me as I only care about the graphics driver). Sadly, the same issue occurs again.

At this point, I've been trying this for a week now (in between work and other stuff) and I've got no idea what is wrong. Is it just that Windows 11 isn't meant to work with my graphics card on my iMac or has anyone else had the same experience as me and resolved it?

Appreciate anyone's input!

UPDATE:

I guess no-one has any input on this....no biggie. I finally figured it all out last night. I gave up on trying to install Windows 11, since I couldn't find a working AMD driver for my iMac that was compatible.

However, I went back to the AMD website yesterday and looked for older iMac 2020 Retina 5K drivers and found version 19.50 released in June 2020 (must've missed this before). Instead of trying to install Windows 11 on the new external, I just installed Windows 10 again. Installed the drivers I found above and....so far so good! Seems to be working fine. Issue resolved :)
 
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