I like to add my experience during my installation of my Radeon R9 290 GPU.
Basically, I would agree you need to do what others have already suggested to do, with the summary here:
- clean/remove other previous driver (Nvidia, ATI, etc), although in my experience, I don't uninstall my onboard GPU's driver (Intel 4600).
Also I am a bit "lucky", because I installed in a fresh Windows 8.1 64bits, but it should not be a big factor.
- use the latest catalyst installer from AMD website, but not beta (I use ver 14.4).
Make sure you select the correct 32 or 64 bits.
- make sure your PSU has at least 650 watts
- make sure you have installed .NET frameworks 4.5, but I am not sure about this, as I read that the latest package doesn't need it
And I'll like to add this:
1. If you get the message "Application Install: install package failure",
it's a general error message that the driver (or other parts of the software package cannot be installed).
Look further info the windows event log, with the source "MSIInstaller". In my case, it's something with a dll cannot be run,
and my solution is to give full control access in the temp folder for "Everyone".
Search google of how to do this.
2. Make sure that you install the GPU card on the motherboard and firmly press it down, but don't break your motherboard.
And you see there are 2 power plugs, 6 and 8 pins, side by side, and above them, there are 2 lights.
When there is power, and you plug in the power cable, these 2 lights have to be GREEN, not red.
You don't have to turn on the pc to see the light lit. You just need to switch on the main power switch on the back of the PSU.
And my biggest mistake here is that for the first hours of my fight, I didn't notice one of the lights was red (ontop the 8pins plug).
The culprit is I used the supplied cable converter from the GPU package to convert from 6-pins to 8-pins.
The supplied converter turned out to be useless, and I found the solution from this place:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2222160/radeon-290-power-issue.html
Actually I have just need to combine my plug 6 + 2 pins to form a 8 pins plug. And voila, the light turns green.
3. When you install the catalyst package, select custom install.
Then it will try to detect the hardware, to determine which component should be installed.
If you see one of them is "driver", then it means the installer/pc can detect your GPU, and you are good to go.
Otherwise, you have to retry other solution first, before you go this far.
This is my first experience for using ATI GPU in my life, and I have better experience with NVidia, better installation, support, etc.