169.32 rocks

just throwing it out there- i had updated to 17x series and thought i would stay there, but 169.32 got me better performance in counterstrike and higher clock speeds. its also a whql driver, i thought it was beta and just added support for a new card or something. whatever.

these drivers are STABLE. my new clocks are 550/900! that is just plain ridiculous to me. 40% increase in memory speed from apple clocks, or 30% from nvidia clocks. thats also a solid 15% increase in core clock. 8600m gt is bandwidth hungry though, so its all a good thing. Maybe I'll even install crysis again... (sarcasm)

These are the best drivers I've seen in a while. Also most other drivers of late cut my source game performance in half (from like 150 frames to 80ish) judging from counter strike source. These have restored it.

 

Cool! I'll try it, have been hesitating upgrading from my 169.09, but with your sterling review I'll give it a shot. Looks like Old faithful going to spew.

 

Masterchef341 do you think i should go from 169.28 to them?

 

Are the 169.09 ones the latest for XP 32bit?

 

Maybe I ought to give this one a try! I've heard that you can install them even without the modded inf because they are WHQL certified. Is that true?

 

not sure. I think the modded inf is a good thing for desktop drivers on a laptop though.

 

+ Rep for the heads up. Might give them a spin. What were your old clocks by the way ?

 

Agreed. I just installed and ran 3DM05 and got a 1.6% increase compared to 84.63 w00t!

 

That may not be significant. An increase of that small of a magnitude could simply mean that there are fewer background processes running than before.

 

Well, I just tested these drivers in the World in Conflict benchmark... and was very surprised.

I updated from the 169.21 driver.

These are the results: (fps using same settings)
169.21-> 9 min, 17 avg, 32 max
169.32-> 12 min, 20 avg, 36 max

Its a very good improvement.

Edit: I tried HL2, with my settings the maximum fps were 63fps (169.21 drivers), now increased to 85-110.

 

Yeah but this driver doesn;t allow you to adjust digital vibrance.

 

yeah my praise of these drivers was basically because they returned half life performance to its proper insanely fast state.

 

I just installed 169.32 and got a 200 3dmark06 bump and 4 degree celsius drop in temp.

I was previously using stock drivers though... so maybe that doesn't amount to much....

 

Hmm...I get better results with the 167.55 drivers

3dmark06-default settings.(stock driver setting, no OC)
167.55-3442
169.32-3411

 

A 31 point difference in 3DMark06 is well below the error you get running the program multiple times.

 

I'm using 163.75. I may upgrade, but I love 163.75 though.

Are you talking Vista or XP here? I'm talkin' XP lol

 

Im using XP and I upgraded from 163.75 too. No probs so far.

 

I restarted my laptop every time.

 

How do you get the Inf. into the driver, every time I try to get into the driver files the install wizard runs.

 

Quick question,


I have been having issues just installing my drivers, but just recently overcoming that problem. My question:


Did you uninstall the stock drivers the manufacturer provided you with first then install the 169.32?? Thanks

 

What I mean is that if you ran 3DMark06 multiple times with the same settings/drivers/etc your score would most likely vary more than the 31 point difference you noticed with the different drivers.

So basically, their performance are basically equal if you use 3DMark as your sole benchmarking tool.

 

Extract the driver so its in its own folder. download the inf and put it into that folder (overwrite the existing one) the run setup.exe.

The order of installing new drivers is here. Look for my post.