M17XR1 - Nvidia Cold Shoulder for 275

Greetings all,
As many of you have noticed, Nvidia has now reached the 275 video driver set, and we are currently on the 3rd release. The two most current drivers, 275.33 and 275.50, will not install unless you modify the INF file. However, even if you the modify the INF, they are highly unstable for current games such as Hunted the Demon's Forge. Perhaps we can motivate Nvidia to make these drivers more compatible "as the readme suggests".

Thanks,
Gabe

 

Dell mods the drivers so you can only use the drivers from the Dell download page if I'm not mistaking.

 

Most drivers prior to the 275 series would install and performed somewhat better than the OEM drivers. It's just a shame that the 275 series doesn't work.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

need to mod, and not stable... now stability is a difficult subject: on the R1, with pcie-gen2 OFF, games behave quite good actually.

But there is clearly something wrong with the last drivers, they give me A LOT of BSOD: when switching between integrated or SLI, or when shutting off or boot.

And let's not forget the screen that sometimes doesn't wake up while on discrete cards which is a PITA, I had to modify the action of the power button so that it restarts the computer...

Oh and also, flash videos crash a lot in firefox lately. I guess this is why the 260m/280m cards are not in the 275.xx releases

 

I'm getting system freezes in wow with the two mention even with pcie2 off.

 

Interestingly enough, I think I was having flash related crashes in IE9 as well...... It's getting pretty bad when a flash video won't run lol.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

My M17xR1 with 280M SLI is currently installed with BIOS A2 and NVIDIA driver ver 259.64. The mainboard was replaced by Dell service som while ago due to discrete graphics disfunction. I do experience graphic driver restart frequently, as well as sound freeze, black screen and need of total HARD-shutdown by powerbutton, especially if in gaming mode.

Latest drivers 275.33 fails to localte correct NVIDIA hardware, so i guess i will try to rollback to earlier DELL-approved drivers to check if this will solve the display-driver problem issue!

 

Beta p06 is the only way to go for us r1 users, as our system grows older we will have lesser and lesser chance to get any video driver update.

With the latest bios and the beta p06 i don't have any problem at all with my system.

Now as now I haven't found anyone without problems with different drivers (maybe someone with pcie2 off but thats not something suggestable).

 

What is the "p06 beta" driver (i presume it is a NVIDIA driver, so where can i find it and what is the "official" version numbering)?

 

The only problem with Dell's 197.84 is that it does not include the lastest SLI profiles. So people with SLI are loosing a lot of performance with those older drivers and newer games.

 

So it seems the options are either setting PCI E2 off and using relatively new NIVIDIA drivers (i have set this to off now and so far no crashes with my current version 259.64 and BIOS A2). Or using the old version "beta P06" (=197.84?) but then experience poor SLI-performance?

 

What exactly is the downside of turning PCI E2 to off, with M17x R1 and 280M SLI?

 

You're halving the bandwidth across the PCIe bus to your graphics cards (PCIe 2 boubles the bandwidth over 1). However, how much that affects gaming is hard to say. Many saying they lose only a few fps.

I noticed some quite large fps drops during Witcher 2, so I just play with it on now, and put up with the occasional crashes (had like 1 in the last month).