MBP's Nvidia 8600M GT: best drivers and overclocking?

Hi folks,

Has anyone found better drivers than the ones supplied by Bootcamp 1.3? and what success have you had with overclocking?

On my old MBP, I had sussed out how to install Omega ATI drivers and overclock with ATI Tool; but I haven't been able to find Nvidia equivalents (eg. Xtreme-G drivers don't find compatible hardware on my MBP).

Also, games like GRAW seem to report my 256mb card as a 512mb, and games are often freezing on a default XP install on a 32gb FAT32 partition (pagefile set to 3072mb - as suggested by tweakguides.com - this is an allowable size under FAT32, right?). Any advice?

Cheers,
Broad

 

Nobody has consistently reported using any video drivers other than those from Bootcamp 1.3 because the 8600 gt in the MacBook Pros have performed in line with cards in other computers. You might find some drivers to use from laptopvideo2go.com but I would stick with the stock drivers for now. I think most people made use of RivaTuner to overclock, and were successful in increasing clocks a few MHz without much additional heat.

I'm not sure, but I think these 8600s make use of turbo-ram or hyper-memory or whatever Nvidia calls it where they can make use of system ram to supplement what they have built in. That is probably what is being reported.

Also, I assume you are utilizing the Fat32 file system so that you can manipulate files within OSX. It could be the reason for freezing games. See if you can convert it to NTFS.

 

fat32 itself should not be freezing games, unless the game has individual files about 4Gb in size, but no game does afaik.

also, if your fat32 hard drive is filled to capacity (or approaching capacity) like 25+ gigs of used space, that could be causing some problems that are just inherent with fat32.

 

The overclocking potential on the 8600m is interesting. Barefeats.com noted that:
-15" clock speeds are 470 core / 635 memory.
-17" clock speeds are 520 core / 650 memory.

The 17" speeds are actually higher that reported for the card on nvidia.com:
- clock speeds 475 core / 700 memory

Then I read about an overclocking experiment on the same card in a 'zepto' laptop ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=122876), where the card's stock core speed was 475 (it was a engineering sample card, so the memory was only DDR2 at 400). The card's core was successfully clocked to 702 core, with temperature remaining in the 80-90C range.

I did some short experiments on overclocking my 15" MBP's 256mb card last night with Rivatuner, and got 5-15% performance boosts, with temperature being reported as remaining in the normal clock parameters (70-84C). I was going to try using SMC fan control under OSX to set a high fan speed, and then restart in Windows, but didn't get around to it. This can be a useful difference if trying to drive DX9 features at high resolutions in GRAW, COD2 etc (where stock clocks might only give 30-40fps).

The maximum clock I tried which seemed fine was 650 core / 675 memory. Any other reports, suggestions?

 

braoddd,

you got the MBP 2,4 GPU up to 650/675 core/memory? That's awesome? Was it stable at that speed? That's is midway to 8700mGT specs.

About RivaTuner.... What if you set the clock too high, will it automatically restore to lower clocks or will it render the system unusable?!?
The only game that needs the power and that I'm interested in playing is Crysis, whenever it's going to be out!

 

It seemed stable. But what's the best way to test stability? Just run 3dmark or games and look for glitches? I was playing FEAR and was noting that the framerate varies quite a lot at high/max settings depending on the scene* at 1280x800, 4xFSAA 4x Filtering etc (eg. 20-50); but I think that's probably normal even at standard clocks. I will post more detailed benches later, but I recall the ingame performance was less than the inbuilt performance benchmark test promised

*eg. in one empty room, it's 20 standing in one spot, but goes to 50 when you move forward a little, then 20 when you move back... perhaps lighting/shadow effects or something. I'll try turning them down from max

 

www.laptopvideo2go.com is the best site for Windows NVIDIA drivers. I saw my Vista performance rating increase a decent amount when moving to those drivers versus the Boot Cap ones.

I never overclock, especially in a laptop -- too risky, especially given the MBP's relatively small size and small cooling capacity.

 

Well, I overclocked for 18m on my Rev A x1600 MBP with no dramas. Admittedly, I was only clocking it back to its usual operating clocks.

 

Just an update that newer drivers are required for at least Splinter Cell Double Agent to run playably. The Bootcamp 1.3 graphics drivers create 'geometry errors' in the game (ie. Sam looks like a funky cloud of black smoke, etc).

I found that Nvidia's newer drivers fix that problem, and the only place I found to get them installed on my MBP was laptopvideo2go.com (where I went for the 162.18 version).

You also have to create a shortcut to the Splinter Cell app in the offline/system folder, and add -ll (those are two Ls) to it. Eg. "C:/program files/SplinterCell.exe" -ll

The game is still kinda buggy regardless of what PC/Mac hardware you play it on, and you might have to experiment a bit with changing display settings between 'standard', 'next gen' and 'custom', and restarting, to actually get the high detail shaders to display. But finally I got the ice to look shiny and detailed, rather than a flat slab of grey, and I knew victory was mine!

Cheerio,
Bruce

 

I went to that site and tried some drivers that were supposed to be for the 8600m gt, but I got an error when trying to install them. Reason was cause I've been having some problems with CSS, but I'm reinstalling the game, and hoping that it will solve the problem. If not I'm gonna have to look at different drivers I guess.