GPU driver?

Last I checked we were still stuck at the nvidia 165 driver because of stealth mode problems, yet nvidia official drivers have now gone up to 177 as far as I know and there could be substantial gains if we could get it to work. It's a long time since I read about the testing of different drivers and there have been new releases since then. Have anyone tested some of the recent drivers (official or modified) and confirmed whether they work or not? If not then that is pretty bad considering that video drivers are fairly important to a gaming machine.

 

I second this motion. if alienware won't do it for us, then we'll have to do it ourselves.

PLUS! I've been having problems with my computer going into/out of sleep/hibernate and I suspect that a driver upgrade for the video might make things a bit more stable on the resume/wakeup side of things.

anyone been tinkering?

 

driver 175.63 works. when your m15x is idle the clocks will downclock and when you play games the clocks will go back up.

 

Automatically? That is neat. Might reduce some heat too. But can you still force it to downclock with the stealth mode button? Also, how do you install them? You need an inf file that supports the mobile chipset don't you? At laptopvideo2go the news drivers are 169.09 so those won't work.

 

That's why you use the modded .inf files off of laptopvideo2go to make them work.

 

THANK YOU so much... I've wanted to tinker for a long time, I just don't want to mess up my computer beyond repair, then have to restore/respawn/reformat.

I'm gonna head on over to Laptopvideo2go (or whatever the site) and get the new drivers now.

 

Mystik, please tell us if you see any gaming improvements, frame rates etc, so as to know if it is worth downloading it. Thanks, would really appreciate it.

 

I've just reinstalled 3dmark06 (the free version) to do before and after benches. I'll also stresstest using RivaTuner and FurMark (I've done this before on my video card, so I know it's currently stable)

Keep your eyes on this thread for details.

 

Okay, Preliminaries are in. Core/Shader/Mem clocks are the same. so 100% performance for my card. (clocks are 675/1350/800 aprox).

Pre upgrade 3DMark06 Score: 4780
which, I think is higher than the first time I used 3DMark06 on my system.

Keep in mind I have the 8700M GT

Post upgrade 3DMark06 Score: 5102

+322 3DMarks.

The system is strange though, at full clock it runs normal, but when there's no stress on the system, it first downclocks to (core/shader/mem): 297/594/300, then, still under low-load, drops again to 182/364/601. the core/shader go down, but the mem goes up? strange.

Enabling Stealth pushes clocks to 297/594/300 (middle stepping), and seems to keep graphics heat below 60 degrees.

I'm stress testing now, and I likely will be for more than a few hours... keep your eyes peeled for a reliability update later tonight. (=

Perhaps someone with an 8800M GTX can also do these tests and let us know.

 

Preliminary stability tests are showing the card as stable. though it looks like CPU usage is up a bit on 3D rendering (one CPU is at 100% nearly full time while rendering FurMark. can anyone with the original 165 driver confirm that CPU usage is lower while stresstesting the card?), the card is remaining stable. so far, GPU temp is locked at 83 degrees.

Currently I have it on a targus Chillmat to help handle the temps. The Chillmat is on.

I just turned on Prime95 to fully tax the CPU and GPU and I will leave it running like this, in my room, so that I can return to a sauna.

I'll be sure to post again to let everyone know if there's any errors reported.

 

this driver does really help with the idle temperatures. before my idle temperatures were around 74 since the summer is here and it gets kind of hot in my room since there are 2 other desktops on at the same time. with 175.63 my new idle temperature is 55. that is quite a significant difference imo.

 

Yea, this driver is really impressive.

On stealth mode with the 175.63 driver, the 8800M GPU down clocks to 383/300 & 200/100 (idle)!!

I haven't done any extensive testing yet since I just installed it earlier. Just tested the stealth mode and it works. Now for some Crysis...

 

mine automatically downclocks to 100 without stealth mode after sometime so i think it renders stealth mode useless with dedicated.

 

@Everyone - The reason the card downclocks on your desktop is because of something called powermizer. It downclocks the card while running 2d apps simply because keeping the clocks up would do nothing. It also saves battery life.

 

The system appears to be stable. with Furmark running for almost 20000 seconds, there's no regular recurring downclocking or performance issues. however there seems to be a semi regular performance lag, lasts for only about an interval... probably not very noticable in-game (or any real scenario)...

overall I'd give these drivers and initial thumbs up. I'll stick with them and report back if anything goes bad.

 

Hrmm can someone point me in the correct direction for the 175.63 driver/inf file

 

For 32 bit Vista
For XP

 

Thx for the info!

 

no problem! let us know if you have any problems.

 

This is an update to my previous post.

Overall, the performance of this driver doesn't meet my expectations. There was no noticible performance increase in Crysis. Every so often the game would slow down and drag drastically for a few seconds (in both directX9 & 10 modes). I thought that this only happened in Crysis, but it also happens in Gears of War. Halo 2 PC crashed every time I try to change the resolution. Bad.

3dMark06 scores were a lot lower.
At 1280x768 = 9100 3dmarks(these drivers), 9700's(AW stock drivers)
At 1024x768 = 9500 3dmarks(these drivers), 9900's(AW stock drivers)

Alienware stock drivers give better performance than these drivers.

However, temps are a lot cooler with these drivers. I never hit 90C while gaming. On idle with these drivers I got temps as low as 41C. So, these drivers keep the GPU a lot cooler than stock AW drivers.

IMO, it's not worth it to install these drivers unless you want the cooler temperatures. Performance wise, these drivers are not as good as the AW ones. So, it's back to stock AW drivers for me!

 

@Syth - I said in my post 2 above yours that you can find it in my SLi guide They are the tweakforce 175.63 drivers.

 

Well the reason i was asking is because i think i have come across my first problem, which would could also explain my low 3dmark06 score. While i was playing AoC i suddenly got a blue screen and it mentioned something about nvmdkl.sys (something like that) and from what i could tell it was an issue with the vid card, bu i thought nothing of it since it was AoC which is still buggy like crazy. So i tried WoW and same thing happened (after a much longer time though).

I install these new drivers (175.63) and it looked like everything was ok. But after a while of playing WoW, it happened again. So it is not driver related. there is a slim chance that it might be the ram I installed myself but i doubt that because it only seems to happen when i am gaming.

Any ideas, or where i should go from here?

 

1. Take out 1 stick and try it that way.
2. Replace the original AW ram then test it.
3. Run Memtest86 with your ram and see if it finds any errors.
4. Could be your video cards then

 

try a memory testing application... most bios's can do a basic test, but with the m15x, the more in-depth testing algorithms may be disabled in the menus... I know Vista has one integrated... perhaps try F8 while booting to get to the boot menu and find it?

there are others that burn to CDs and boot that way, I forget the names though.

If games are crashing because of it, any reasonable RAM testing app will find the fault.

 

Thx for the info guys. I'm gonna try to get my lil bro on msn and I'll walk him through the vista memory test, so atleast i can rule that out before i get home from work

 

Hrmm well the Vista mem test didn't find any errors.

 

Another screwed up GPU?
Just revert back to old drivers and see if that solves your problem.

 

I reverted back, gonna try out Crysis Demo in a little bit. If i don't see a BSOD from that then i should be ok