Drivers from LV2G

With all these drivers out how do we know which ones are best? I know the answer is to test but that is very time consuming. I keep hearing 169 are best for laptops but im using 173 and they give me the best ever 3DMark.

Ive used 84.63, 165, 163.75, 174.16 and 174.31 and my 3Dmark has always gotten better and i've never had any trouble OC'ing.

so what does everyone else think?

 

I've tried to keep up with the newest driver release, but now that the 174 drivers are for the 9 series cards I begin to wonder if maybe I should avoid them.

A few of the 174 drivers cause my screen to go completely insane after a few days, with random flickering and strobing that sometimes wont go away unless I revert to 169 drivers.

So I wonder if my proprietary MBP 8600m GT has issues with some of these drivers.

Otherwise, I am using 174.16 right now and it is working decently.

 

I dont understand how people keep defaulting to the 169.x series? Have these conclusively been proven better than any other driver? Why do the 174 desktop series give better performance than the 169 laptop series?

 

Yea I Got the best 3dmark06 results using 173.41 too

around 4500ish i think

 

Its for this reason that I haven't upgraded from my standard Dell's yet. Should look into this though...

 

I won't merged this thread with the driver update guide because I think a lot of people can benefit from this discussion.

The 169 series drivers are mentioned often because they are proven perfomers. The performance difference between them and the newer drivers is not great and the 170+ series drivers seem to have more issues. Just go check out the LV2G forums and read some of the comments.

I personally use the 169.21 drivers in my desktop. No problems. The drivers I recommend are the 169.04 and 169.28. Why? Because they're stable and have all around good performance.

 

I've used a few of the 171 series in Vista x64 with great results so far.

Nearly identical performance in Oblivion, Titan Quest, and Doom 3 as XP SP2 32-bit.

 

I just re-installed 174.31 again and now I'm getting a new high score for 3d mark! Previous : 5673, Currently: 5721

 

I upgraded to 174.16 the other day from 169.09. Fps on stress test is better and no issues so far on a x64 8400m GS.

Id give it a thumbs up (Y)

169.09 is the most stable AFAIK, which also makes it the most downloaded

 

Thanks Chaz, I see why people would therefore go for the 169 series if they are most stable.

Tbh, I've only had one stability issue and that was with 165 which was regarded as a dubious driver anyway. I'm going to stick with my 174.31 although Im very tempted to test 169.21 to see how the laptop optimised drivers do against my current ones. Im glad people have upgraded from 169 to 174 and have seen improvements since it means im using a good driver.