G51 w/260M won't downclock at ilde, driver advice?

Hey Guys,

I'm working on my old G51VW that I sold my buddy a couple years ago, still runs great! Just needed some cleaning up and tweaking as he's not into computers and doesn't maintain windows, etc, and something corrupted the video driver and caused DVD's to play with weird color pallet. Cleaned up windows and updated, and have the latest Nvidia driver installed, 320.49, and everything is running properly, DVD's now play properly.... but, have one question, and I seem to remember this being a question in the past when I owned it, but it's been a while and several laptops

Does anyone know of a fairly recent driver that will properly downclock the GPU when at 2D or idle clocks, ie basic office stuff etc? These drivers keep it locked at full clocks, and obviously impact battery life and create unneeded heat. He doesn't game, so there's no need to keep them at full speed and gaming performance isn't a big concern.

Thanks! Did a search but not much info in the past couple years. Laptop is still running great, still a nice machine! Was nice to get some time playing with it again. Build quality wise it has definitely stood up very well. :thumbsup:

 

O I remember having this same issue when I had the G51. Such a picky system haha.

Try these..
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...o-198-05-whql-drivers-ms-update-released.html

Otherwise google 186.82.. I remember those were the most stable drivers I could find and they also downclocked if I remember correctly.

 

Do you have your power settings correctly configured to save power (Balanced profile) and not the High Performance one? Just for testing.

 

get this

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...izer-switch-get-most-out-your-video-card.html

i use it on my G51vx. after i install a new driver, it resets. so i have to run the program again, and reboot. it will remain set until i update the drivers. it allows the video card to downclock. i have it set to ON on battery and A/C. never gives me any issues, does what it says on the label.

 

Thanks for the help guys, have tried a few different drivers and have now developed a new issue... my buddy just dropped the G51 back off for me to look at, it now appears the GPU is going out. Seems to be showing all the symptoms: screen flashes randomly, desktop gets garbled, blue screens, display driver crashes recovers and crashes again.

Will still boot to safe mode, but once I load normally and install a Nvidia driver things quickly go back to constant crashes. Will test a bit further but not looking good.... at least the machine lived a good life ha

 

Yeah, if the driver fails to load then it's goodbye card

 

Oddly enough, it appeared stable in safe mode, so I installed the latest Nvidia drivers along with the Powermizer tool posted above by grungeboy, and the GPU downclocks properly and has been stable all afternoon. Played some videos, let it loop a game for an hour, browsing, etc and it's been totally fine with the new driver. Great tip for those still having downclocking issues, that Powermizer tool is quite nifty. Clocks vary from 200-500 on the core, which I recall seems about right for the 260m.

Anything else I should try before I give it back and tell him to just use it and see? My gut has to think there's a GPU problem but I've let it idle, started it cold, pushed it at full clocks, and used it on and off all day without an issue once I installed the new drivers and got powermizer working. Buddy isn't a gamer and just uses it for basic web browsing and office around the house.

Thanks again for all the help as usual

 

It could be a thermal/contraction issue with solder somewhere in the system which could give intermittent issues.

 

Yep, that's all I could assume... sad because it was still a decent performing machine! I told him I couldn't guarantee it was going to be totally reliable so he elected to purchase my G46 from me as a replacement. I'm now Asus-less for the first time in years...

Thanks for the help all! And, for anyone searching this thread in the future, that powermizer tool posted above did work wonders for fixing the downclocking issue, even with the newest 327 drivers.

 

Well they should be happy with the G46, similar performance in a smaller more mobile package.

 

wanted to comment, i'm still using the powermizer tool, with current nvidia drivers.

every now and then i'll run into a game that doesn't kick the video card to full speed. it's rare, Starcraft 2, is one of the few games i've found that does this. the solution is to go into the nvidia control panel, find/make the profile for SC2, change the power setting from Adaptive to Prefer Full Power. this makes the card kick to full speed when the game is launched, and return to normal after it closes.

this is using my Asus G51vx.

i added a 240GB ssd and a Apple iMac e8235 CPU @ 2.8Ghz. newest nvida drivers, 337.xx WHQL, on the stock GTX260m

 

Thanks for sharing, I have not run into that before, what sort of load percentages do you get on the GPU during starcraft 2 out of curiosity?