Slightly surprising it had driver support 6 months before it was released.
Curious why you'd want the oldest drivers that most likely aren't that good.

djsabreblade wrote on 2023-11-11, 22:25:

Hi guys, just to mention the oldest ati drivers that work with my x1650 pro are the august 2, 2006 ati catalyst drivers. i found them on the original driver disk and made an iso for all if anyone needs it just let me know here.

You might want to upload it to Archive.org and someon with access can upload it to www.vogonsdrivers.com

In late 2005 I got a Radeon 9250 but I don't even remember what it looked like or what brand it was, but later in April 2006 I was given a Radeon 9600 by the computer tech I was working for. I used that Radeon 9600 (I also forget what brand it was unfortunately) until sometime in August 2007 when my family helped me to purchase a Radeon X1650 pro. The reason I bought the X1650 pro was the 9600's fan malfunctioned and the computer kept bsod'ing because the card kept overheating. So I put the 9600 somewhere and never used it again (in some box). Fast forward to now and I WISH I still had the 9600 more than ever as older is now better (obviously). There's nothing new being made that's good anymore. So I have a new theory. Obviously trying to buy a GOOD used 9600 pro on ebay is like $150 or MORE so thats too much for me. So I though well wait a minute what if I throw in my old X1650 pro and that will have to do? But there's a problem, drivers cannot be installed older than say January 2007. And that's too new since 2006 is the cutoff year for me considering it old school. Well that's wrong. I actually was able to even use the !March 2006! X1600 (not x1650 pro) drivers to fool the card into thinking it was a X1600. But after 3 shutdowns and reboots the computer would just keep rebooting without loading windows. No idea why on the 4th reboot it crashes on startup since the card was running everything I threw at it with the march 2006 ati catalyst drivers. So I just booted into safe mode and settled on the stable August 2, 2006 x1650 pro drivers. Good enough. I was hoping for the March 2006 X1600 drivers though. I may experiment at some point to see if using X1800 or X1900 drivers would make any difference (probably not 🤣) . I can't afford a 9600 pro so my old x1650 pro will have to do (for now 🤣).