260.99 NV WHQL Driver

Can't say that this ever happened to me, and I played the life out of that game with the old drivers in my signature. I don't believe we even had the A03 bios at that time. Ideally,this shouldn't happen because your cards shouldn't be downclocking whilst gaming. And the DPC issue relates to the GPU clocks downclocking. So the question. Why were your GPUs downclocking while playing this game?

I might actually revert to an older driver and give Fallout 3 a shot again, just to see if I could possibly reproduce your experience.

This right here is what I find interesting since a lot of people are reporting issues along these lines -- crashes; driver failure and recovery; etc.

Based on the information from dell.co.uk support, the R2 with 285s is supposed to run under the following.

- NVIDIA 197.52 Graphics Driver for GTX 285M

 

That's correct, and the Dell-provided 197.52 driver is what I'm currently running.

 

Is this Dell driver working out okay? Do you experience any of the sleep-related issues or the crashes that quite a few are reporting with the other Verde drivers?

 

Stability is rock solid, and I haven't had a single crash or driver failure. The performance in gaming seems more or less identical to 260.99, but I haven't done a detailed comparison of that or the temps due to the aforementioned instability.

I don't make use of the sleep function in day to day usage, but my test just now worked fine.

Additionally, I've had no problems with the GPUs not downclocking properly that I had on my R1. I regularly found that I'd have to switch the dedicated cards off in hybrid SLI to get the temperatures (and the noise!) down.

I've actually been quite impressed with the GPU temps in this system, despite some comments over higher temps compared to the 5870s. At idle / background tasking the temps are around 35-38C, and during gaming or encoding using CUDA temps are around 50C.

 

Well then, perhaps you should stick with the driver for the time being until Dell and Nvidia get their act together. Sounds decent. Perhaps I should give it a shot. Hah.

 

Yep, it might be time to look at modding the inf for 197.52. lol

EDIT: INF supports the cards already. 9400 has to be added before it will work with the 17xR1. Working on it.

 

Nothing to do with the downclocking (never had an issue with downclocking on this machine). DPC issue affected streaming audio and video (including recording and playback), and Fallout used MP3 for it's radio soundtracks. As soon as the DPC fix driver was released all the radio audio problems in Fallout went away.

Was pretty easy to check to, running DPC Latency checker and GPUz the intervals of static on the Fallout radio matched the spikes on DPC while no clock changes were noted in GPUz.

Problem wasn't excessive, just the occasional extra static on the radio that just got annoying after a while. There was no impact on gameplay, no drop in FPS, only affected the radio. After the fix, the radio was allot nicer to listen to.

 

I had a few crashes on these drivers just recently, seemed to be stable for some time until this happened.

Wasn't taxing the gpu's that hard when the screen crapped, so I back to thinking hardware issues.

As far as Sleep mode, I found many laptops tend to be tempermental when it came to resuming power from standby. so I avoid it, and just power down/up

With the SSD drive boot up times are under 30 seconds anyways

 

Hi BatBoy, how is 197.52 compared to 197.84 ??? are they newer? 197.84 are really old...

 

Hmm. That's interesting because BatBoy did some tests and we had come to the agreement that the issue of audio and video streaming-stuttering was linked to the GPUs downclocking. I never had issues streaming MP3s so I was eager to understand what it was that people were experiencing. Then BatBoy had me run WMP with visualisations on and that helped me reproduce the audio stutter and it occured when the GPU was clocking down; also verified on DPC Latency Checker. I thought that was the whole issue right there, and that explained the changes that Nvidia incorporated in the new drivers. Eh, perhaps I've been out of the loop with this DPC-drama for too long.

Like I said, I would like to duplicate this experience for my knowledge since apparently, I had a very diffrent idea of the subject. At this point, with the general wave of information on this forum, I am officially confused as to why DPC latency occured with the older drivers.

 

Kade, the clock changes definitely did cause huge DPC spikes, that is correct. Usually didn't affect games much when the clock rates hit max anyways. These affected WMV and audio file playback terribly each time the clocks changed making movies and music a pain to watch/listen to.

Actually, I might be wrong myself, might not be thinking of the NVidia driver but the A03 Bios. Just went and refreshed myself in the old thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/434691-m17x-dpc-latency.html.

May have been the combination of the bios and driver that stopped my audio recording issues in Goldwave and Audacity, and the bios that stopped my issues with Fallout. Bah, must be getting senile in my old age.

 

Is this via the microphone, or is there a way to actually get the Wave Out Mix to work on the M17x?

 

No never had to record wave out. Do all my recording via external sound box via firewire.

Don't think there is a Wave Out / Mono Out / Stereo Mix recording device in the drivers for some reason. My desktop with with a Xonar HDAV has the Stereo Mix option in disabled devices though. Odd

 

please tell us when you finish

 

Ah. . . I hear ya', dude. That's what I was originally trying to imply. Now it's making sense again. It was a combination of A03, which did greatly reduce the general latency issue. The driver resolved the problem with the spikes over GPU clocking.

So, hypothetically speaking, if you were to use an older drive now, with the A03 BIOS, you shouldn't experience that audio pop/stutter with games like Fallout 3.

P.S. I'm certainly gettin' senile. Lawl.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/535696-modified-nv-197-52-driver-m17xr1-only.html

 

Well I got a little over-excited in the beginning but same thing started happening on my R1 after a while, back to P06 for me

Also, system did wake up from sleep with 260.99 but very unstable after that (programs crashing, memory violations etc.), basically no use, had to restart anyway.

 

Sorry to dig this up again, but it's bugging me. Can you tell me what bios version are you using ?

 

Hi,
I’m new on the forum and sorry for my English, it’s not my native language.
I’ve got a SLI Dual 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280M on a M17x.
I’m running the 186.64 Driver since I’ve bought this computer in December 2009.
I mainly use it at home with Ac on, very rarely on battery, with the Boost performance always on, unless power goes down and I have to re-enable the hybrid setting in the BIOS.
I use it to watch NFL gamepass on Flash player, play games on Steam mainly CoD Modern warfare2, CoD Black Ops, Mass effect 2 installed but never played yet, Silent hunter 5 (a bit slow now that I think of it), Battlefield Bad company.
I never noticed any problem other than the green screen on flash with YouTube videos or Nfl gamepass, easily fixed disabling hardware acceleration but no crash whatsoever. I’ve never tested performance of the graphics and I`ve kept a 59Hz refresh rate. Rarely use sleep mode.
Silly me, yesterday I`ve tried to install new updates for my M17x, (against my better judgement, since my very very bad experience with nVidia updates that never worked on my previous Dell Inspiron 17”. By the way did they test their drivers sometimes at Dell??? For the price we pay the hardware they should...).
After installing a suite of updates I’ve put on the 257.38 nVidia driver update and after a while watching flash, the screen went black (in the last 3 minutes of the jets-patriots playoff game...  , audio crashing and sound looping, and I had to reboot.
Tried to disable some updates (webcam, etc) same results screen goes black after a while, between 5 to 10 minutes, on flash.
Games seem to run ok but I`ve only tried Cod black ops for 10 minutes.
The boost performance was on, 1920x1200, no BSOD, only black screen and sometimes strange sounds, with no control I had to reboot.

So I’ve managed to roll back to the 186.64 version with system restore.

My question is, finally, from what I’ve read there are a lot of problems with the new 2xx.xx versions and since I’ve noticed no big problems with my 186.64 driver should I update to this new 260.89 driver?
The boost in performance is compensated by the risks of frequent crashes? Am I really missing performances with 186.64?

By the way, I`m not sure what is R1 R2 R3, different releases of M17x? which is mine?

BIOS A05 - CPU Q9300 @2.53GHz 1066MHz, 12MB L2 Cache – Ram 4Gb DDR3 @1333Mhz - Windows 7 64bit - ST950042 SCSI 7200rpm 500Gb Disk – TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-T633C CD/DVD – Broadcom 1510 WLAN – SLI Dual 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280M

 

You have an R1 since it has a core2 CPU. R2 uses i-core series with the 285M, 5870 GPUs, R3 is the newest version of the 17x and utilizes Sandy Bridge.

As for the the driver change, if 186.64 runs good for you, stick with it. A few posts above, I linked to a modded NV driver based on the current driver provided by Dell for the 285M GTX cards in the M17xR2. Might want to try that one. Other than that, 186.82 was always my driver of choice (yes, DPC was NOT resolved in that version) as it was stable! The DPC issue was a slight audio breakup under specific conditions. For what you use your system for, this might be a good choice as well.

 

Hi and welcome bxbongo!
m17x R1 - intel Core 2Duo /Core 2Quad CPUs
m17x R2 - intel i5/i7 core CPUs
m17x R3 - intel i5/i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs

so yours it's a m17x R1.
So as an answer to your question i'll say you can try and see the results with eighter the .89 and .99 but they are still crashing and you'll be dissapointed,the last beta ones 266.35 are better but not perfect eighter.
So if you want a stressless experience stay with the P06 ones on Dells site HERE.
cheers

 

@katalin, I moved your reply to bongo here - he crossposted and his other post was removed in favor of this one. No big deal bongo - check out the forum rules when you have time.

 

Thank you BatBoy, and katalin 2003 for your answers...
Sorry about that, I had posted the first one in the previous driver thread, thinking it was the 260.99 one , so I posted again here... I will be more carefull next time

 

No problem - let us know how it works out.

 

Hi Batboy,
I’ve read your thread on the modded V197.52, seems interesting, apparently few crashes.
But it’s not clear what I’m missing with my 186.64? Since I’ve got no crashes what’s the point upgrading?
And by the way I’ve seen that SumKallMeTIM has problems with black ops? Something about SLI not fully used, is that true?
The game seems to work fine for me but did I have the dual GTX280M working?
Since I’ve only old PCs, I`ve never seen if my experience is ok with my M17x, and I live in morocco not the most advanced technological country, so no friends to compare the performances of other systems.
Steam system information recognised my 280 so I thought it worked properly.
Does it and how to check?
Thanks guys.

BIOS A05 - CPU Q9300 @2.53GHz 1066MHz, 12MB L2 Cache – Ram 4Gb DDR3 @1333Mhz - Windows 7 64bit - ST950042 SCSI 7200rpm 500Gb Disk – TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-T633C CD/DVD – Broadcom 1510 WLAN – SLI Dual 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280M

 

As long as you are not running into any issues with 186.64 then I wouldnt worry about updating. The reason why TIM ran into an issue is due to the driver not supporting current SLI profile(s) for new release titles. This is common when sitting with an older driver and running a new title. As long as your gaming is working fine then its not an issue.

The 197.84 Katalin linked to should be fine as well. Same issue however with newer titles.

 

i saw that post first so that might be the reason.

That's the sad part of not getting any more updated drivers from our manufacturer. BTW i've been using the modded ones BatBoy made for i think more than a week now and they're nice,great job,man! +1 for the effort.

 

no worries - if you happen to tweak the INF feel free to post an update in that thread. Always open to new innovation.