Best Drivers for 8600 GT

Sorry about that my friend.

 

README.TXT:

These drivers are a combination of information from DNA forceware 158.22, Laptopvideo2go 162.50 drivers, and some manually modifications by myself. Tested with C90S with 8600M GT w/HDMI.

Email me at [email link removed for safety/security reasons] with any questions!



Fixes:

PERFORMANCE. These are the best performing drivers. I tested using 3DMark06, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Far Cry, Battlefield 2142, and Quake 4. Not benchmarks but
actually game play with a keen eye.

HDMI OVERSCAN. These, when used with the provided HDTV overscan instructions, offer the proper displaying of the desktop on HDTV via HDMI.

OVERCLOCKING. For overclocking, you will have to flash the bios of your gpu. This can be accomplished by using nibitor to modify the bios already
on the card and nvflash 5.40 to flash the new clock speeds. Dont forget to change the shader clock as well as the core and mem. Also, dont
forget to backup the bios before you flash. TEST the speeds before you flash by using your stock nvidia driver (101.17) on the driver disk along
with ntune!


Problem:

DVD OR DVD FILE VIDEO TEARING. No matter what driver I use, modified .inf,modifying the .inf, dna drivers, ngo drivers, copying certain files from one version onto another, ANYTHING, I can not
get the video tearing to go away when using clone mode with HDMI in WMP. It is a problem that must be addressed at a video driver file level by Nvidia. Using these drivers there
along with k-lite mega codec pack 3.3.0,there is no tearing with Windows Media Player Classic and Media Center. If you want to use WMP with a dvd file with no tearing you will have
to swap the displays so that the HDTV is the primary display. I also tried every version from 1.35 to 3.3.0 of K-Lite codec pack. This process took me 4 weeks! Trust me, these are the best you will get!

Have fun!

Hybrid Forceware 162.50:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8W0L0T9W

NOW, before you go hollering about "oh no dont flash bios" and "it doesnt need to be flashed", you will HAVE to flash the bios if you want to use drivers newer than 158.22 AND have overscan correction using the included instructions. So if you dont want overclocking or overscan correction on the hdmi out but want newer drivers, then by all means DONT use these. And BTW, if you TEST the overclock for a few hours or overnight before you flash it then you will be safe. Dont bash me for trying to help as ive spent 4 weeks working on the best solution possible. Use it or dont.

Here are the results of my drivers and a clean install of xp. NO tweaks! NO fancy stuff! Just installing windows, all drivers, 3dmark06! CPU at 2.93 and gpu at 530 core 1200 shader 530 mem after looping 3dmark06 each test 15 times for stability test:



EDIT: Scored 4086 with cpu at 2.66

 

Hello Good Sir! (swoley)

This looks like some amazing work. Would you mind mentioning if these drivers work in Windows Vista? I'd like to give them a shot, but not all XP drivers function in Vista.

 

The 162.50 drivers for vista can be found at laptopvideo2go.com but wont have the tweaks i used for mine. They do give the correct output to HDMI without overscan, you will still have to flash gpu bios for overclocking, and the video tearing is present no matter what order you have the displays in and no matter what video player you use. Use the 162.50 if you dont mind having bad video tearing no matter what you do but want the correct HDMI output and you plan to flash your gpu bios.

 

Now are those drivers a good idea for people who don't plan on using a HDTV or overclocking?

 

I just need to overclock my 8600GT under Windows Vista,Is that deriver is good for me ?

 

Hmm, well im using the 163.16 Vista drivers right now. Havent run 3dmark, but CSS is at around 60FPS with every max, 8xcsaa and 4xaf, coh 35average mostly high and some med settings, cant remember what. DoW completely maxed 30+ constant.(All at 1280x800)

I haven't had any crashes with it, playing for extremely long times, and ive seen no problems. I only had CoH installed with the original 101 drivers, and there was an increase.

I have the IFL90 by the way, T7300 2.0ghz, 3gb DDR2 667 ram, 8600m gt 512mb.

 

162.18 are the best drivers I have tried now for Vista 32-Bit.

 

Hey Illmatic, can I OC my card using this driver? and if yes,what the safe core/memory settings should I use ? I use nTUNE and Riva Tuner

 

Are you sure, I found the performance to be on par with 158.45, but I still got the "HL2.exe crash" messages after exiting games in Steam.

Additionally, something annoying is that with 162.18, Windows takes much longer to load. The sidebar, and welcome screen take MANY seconds longer than 158.45.

 

162.18 does make windows boot slower, but I do think they work better than 158.45. I'm curious about bios flashing and overclocking, does that work with mobile cards?

 

Yes. Nvidia has abandoned overclockingn with mobile cards from the 158.22 drivers up in XP and from the 160.04 in Vista. No program will allow you to overclock due to the drivers locking the speeds. This is why I say you have to flash the gpu with newer drivers in order to get faster gpu clocks.

 

the 162.18 is pretty good, one could check it out..i love it

 

wow this 163.14 driver is a major let down, i dont understand everyone is praising this driver. In all my games i saw no performance increase, and basically the same 3dmark06 score, and oblivion performance was basically but in HALF with the SAME settings. i also lost the nvidia control panel. the 158.36 drivers were better ar oblivion, but, i got crash once in a while and had a 20% chance of a bluescreen at start-up. Also i saw some weird artifacts in some games, yet i dont OC with the 158 driver. Sigh all these drivers are crap, they arent even better than the 101 drivers.

 

Just wanted to note that I had a terrible experience with 162.18. System was more sluggish all-around and took longer to load, but that wasn't the worst. Stability went down the tube. Compared with stock 101.x drivers that shipped with my Sager, the 162's caused artifacting in 2 games, War Rock and Guild Wars. Also, in Guild Wars, the performance increase was marginal (with game capped at 60, 101.x was 55-60 with mostly 60, while 162.18 was around the 58-60 range). Guild Wars crashed out once, and a second time I recieved a "your graphics driver has succesfully recovered" message upon returning to Windows. There was alot more "stuttering", although on average the frames were marginally higher. I am downloading 162.22 to see if there are any improvements.

 

They run great for me in games like STALKER with no crashes I believe I also played hl2 on them w/ any problems.

 

With the 156.07 drivers, overclocked to core:630 and mem: 500

I managed to get a 3dmark06 score of 3874! with only 512mb of ram!

 

Sorry, didn't make myself clear 3400 w/o OC's

 

Just got on 162.22- seems stable enough. No games tested yet, though I will do that later. All I can report ATM is that CPU and Memory usage seem to be down from 162.18- at the desktop, CPU went from 8% at idle to 0-2%, and memory usage dropped from 1GB to 920 MB. Not sure if this is entirely from the driver, but some of it clearly is- startup was significantly faster and the system seems much snappier. The nVidia control panel is also much faster in opening and changing settings.

I'll report back with game results later.

 

does anyone with the 163.14 drivers get the nvidia control panel because i dont?

 

I had that issue too DarkMortar, and I just couldn't figure it out for the life of me. In the end I just gave up and went to 163.16 heh. Good luck with that though, maybe someone here knows.

 

163.16 seem to be working well for me too. 162.18 and 162.22 slowed down my games for some reason.

 

god oblivion performance on the 163.14 makes absolutly no sense. On the 158.36 drivers i used to play oblivion on 1024*640 resolution and get like 40 fps outside and 60+ indoor, and my settings were pretty good with hdr and stuff. Then i install 163.14 drivers and my performance pummited down to like mid 20s eveywhere, it makes no sense i am using the SAME EXACT settings. Then guess what this makes even less sense, i then crank up the res in oblivion to 1680, and my performance barely changed, and lol i lowered my settings, barely any change, i then put EVERYTHING execpt AA, all my sliders to the max, and i get 10-15 fps, and thats funny that basically just 10 less fps from low settings, makes no damn sense lol, it sucks, id perfer to just play att he lower res and get great fps.

 

Are you guys getting all these drivers from laptopvideo2go.com? If so, are you using the modded .inf file that is provided with them?

 

Hi...
Maybe anyone know,,, what driver I must use on my G1s...(The best one...)
Thanks...

 

yes i am using the modded inf

 

I have vista premium and drivers are 7.15.11.119.
Gaming is good but sometimes vista reports me that graphic driver stopped responding and recovered from error. (NFS Carbon)
What is the problem?

 

Yes, as far as i know everyone is getting these drivers from laptopvideo2go.com

 

The 163.14 are the worst drivers out there. I got like a 2800 3d mark 06 score with them. 162.18 are the best for oblivion if u don't mind a sluggish computer.

And yes, about 98% of us are using laptopdrivers2go drivers as they have been advertised by everyone on this forum.

@prkys: Update ur driver man.

 

Just wondering what would most people suggest for pure raw performance? 162.18 is what I'm leaning towards from what I read from the various threads but I also know 165.01 is what most people download since it is the newest. I am not planning to overclock just pure stock. Also my GPU has 512MB from dell vostro 1500 but are all of these discrete or is it a like some hypermemory? I heard you can stop the hypermemory for nvidia.

 

The 165s are not the newest drivers. The 163 series is the newest. the numbering system is deceiving. When you go to laptopvideo2go, click on date until it lists down from the 163 series. Try 163.14 or one of the newer ones. The 165s are quite old.

 

For me, actually, the 163.14 drivers performanced smoother than the 162.18.

 

Ill you and me should make a thread which should be made a sticky about which the newest drivers are.

 

^Yeah I learned about the 165 vs 163 thing the hard way by having glitches and problems with the 165.01's.

My 158.22's started dropping my framerates in CSS by about 30 a day, and I had no clue what happened, so I reformatted and now I'm using the 163.16's, which are excellent.

 

my conclusion is that all these drivers are pure crud.

 

Ok, 162.22 is out. Performance is slightly better at the desktop, but War Rock performance is down (although it seems like the artifacts are gone). Guild Wars has higher average frame rates but has random freezes into the 20's that last for a fraction of a second. While short, they are annoying and occur much too often. Trying 163.16 now.

 

Guys.

I think that i'm not wrong but on most laptops that have the gpu built in on the motherboard, you cannot bios flash the gpu because the gpu bios code is inside the laptop bios. I know that some laptop with the 7900 let's you do that but i'm talking general. My last laptop had a phoenix bios and the phoenix bios editor "extracted" the content into a temp folder where you would find the gpu bios rom ( it was a ati rom ). Editing that file with RABIT and then recompiling the laptop bios would apply the "overclock" to the gpu.

My actual laptop (g1s) and yours works like that, the gpu bios is built in the laptop bios and I did not find any AMI bios editor that extracted the bios file contents, and i do know if it's possible on AMI bios. Any ideas here ?? If you have a phoenix bios your overcloking problem should be easy to overcome.

I also found that the latest nvidia drivers, like you allready know, do not let you change the 3d clocks , but i found that the 2d clocks actually change(using rivatunner). So it makes me think that the overclocking programs needs some kind of update to change the 3d clocks on newer drivers. I'm saying this because i had the oportunity to test a desktop 8600gts 320mb card with the newer drivers series and it would also not overclock just like the 8600M-GT.

Any feedback would be nice!

 

You are right about flashing overclocked vbioses. It's a tactic commonly used on desktop computers. Also, they *should* allow you to flash overclocked vbioses in driver revisions that don't allow you to overclock, say the 162.x series.

I'm not terribly sure about the whole flashing notebook GPU's thing. My instinct would be to say that it is possible to just flash the notebook vbios. After all, the GPU, if dedicated, is not sautered to the motherboard, but is connected via the PCI-E bus. Unlike integrated graphics, which live on the northbridge of the motherboard, dedicated cards are completely external of the motherboard architecture and for that reason I would assume that it is possible to flash a vbios into the card independant of system bios.

 

sorry, but i'm right. ATM i can extract the 8600M module from the g1s bios and play with it on nibitor but the rebuild of the laptop bios fails. I need more time and LUCK. If someone finds a reliable ami bios module extract/insert it will be possible

 

I DID IT !! i'm not joking !! I'm using forceware 162.50 !! look at atitool default clocks



The clocks are 585 gpu - 1166 shader and 825 mem.

 

Stable? How are the temps? Mind running a 3DMark06 for us? .

 

3 things:

1. are you using my hybrid drivers?

2. you may need to up the shader clock now because when I ran my 3Dmark06 I was getting like 4000 then changed the shader clock from 1100 to 1200 and got 4206.

3. run 3dmark06 and then run it with your mem at around 575. I have a theory that the memory on the 8600m GT doesnt perform any better if you go over 600mhz.

focus on the shader clock now though and tell us something

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=158099

I'm using stock 162.50 with laptopvideo2go inf

 

Why Riva Tuner show incorrect clock speeds?????

According to ATItool your GPU 585 and shader 1166

Anyone have answer? Please I'm going to do low level v-bios update today
I have Acer Aspire 5920G
My VGA is GF 8600M GT DDR2 256MB(475 GPU/950 Shader/400 Ram)
Who have experience about OCing DDR2 version 8600M GT

 

It's a bug on rivatunner. I've allready reported to the author but he said that he will never support the mobile cards :S we have to live with it

 

Mine is a 8600M gt ddr2 512mb. You will have to google nibitor and nvflash for directions or search around the forums or search for my name. Ive posted directions somewhere but i forgot where.

 

Urgh, I don't know which drivers to use...

 

Wait a sec, you can't use nvflash :S at least on the g1s!!!

 

What???????What's that mean????