Fastest 8600m GT driver

What is currently the fastest 8600m GT 256 mb DDR3 driver?
And/or the best overclockable?

Thanks in advance!

 

Your going to have to just try a bunch and choose the best one for you.

Every graphics card is unique wheter make and model of the computer are the same or not it does not matter. Therefore every graphics card performs better with different drivers. Drivers that generally help most graphics cards are usually the best.

Good luck and try www.laptopvideo2go.com

 

You could try out the 175.19, 174.13, 174.74 and 177.79. Those all worked great for me. I like the 175.19 best, because it has special shader optimization. I get the highest 3dmark score and ingame fps with it. It's also very good for OC and stays relatively cool.

Just do some benchmarking; and don't forget to remove the drivers properly before installing new ones! Someone else here on this forum gave me this checklist (so no credits for me ):

1. Uninstall Driver in windows
2. Restart your computer in safe mode.
4. Once you're in safe mode; run driver sweeper and CCleaner
5. Then launch the installer for the new driver.
6. Restart to normal windows
8. You're done!

That's all there is to it.

The point of booting in safe mode is to ensure that nothing but the core essential of your computer run. So all of the nvidia driver services and processes will not run and thus will be able to beremoved.
You can install the driver without safe mode but something might be running while you install the new driver and won't uninstall.

 

I have the 8600m gt in sli and I've tried 174.31, 174.74, 176.05, 175.90, 177.79 and 175.19. With each install I ran 3dmark06 basic and tested it with call of duty 4 multiplayer and single player using fraps to compare frames per second and by far the fastest driver for my system is 175.19. I went back to it from 177.79 with physx installed and even with physx uninstalled all the other drivers were 200 pts or less than the 175.19. With SLI enabled I got 7575 as my last run of 3dm6 all the rest would score 73xx or below and with sli disabled I scored about 47xx on 3dm6. Unless someone else scored something higher I'm sticking to 175.19 drivers as I know these are unbeatable at the moment.

 

I tried using 175.19 as well. It runs pretty well, and keeps low temps. However I found that 174.74 runs faster for me. What's everyone's thoughts on 174.74 vs 175.19?

 

174.74 I scored 71xx-72xx 3dm6 somewhere around there it's been awhile but compared to 7575 for 175.19 I won't go back. I have dual 8600m gt cards. that's about 300 pts. In your tests is the scoring pretty similar as far as 300 pt difference?

 

175.19 ftw. Bioshock runs like butter.

 

Why doesn't the laptopvideo2go 175.19 driver for XP have a modded inf? Is it not necessary?

 

i had 175.19, now i use 177.79...

175.19 does have a special shader optimization, but all versions that come after that also support special optimization (correct me if im wrong).

As I stated, now i use 177.79, they perform a lot faster...
but... I might switch back to 175.19 if anyone confirms that only 175.19 support the optimization on shaders... -_-''

 

The one's in my sig are very good.

Got them from laptopdrivers2go.

 

Actually, I'm using 177.89 for XP since Dell's upgrade driver was so crappy. Have you had a chance to compare them with any others?

It might sound weird, but I was actually getting better performance in Vista than XP when I used lv2g drivers (don't remember which one... I think 174.xx). In XP, sometimes FPS slows down to a crawl and normalizes afterwards. Odd.

Edit: I've had a chance to play around with the new XP drivers (177.89) and noticed that I'm not having the slowdown issues anymore. I think they were occurring only with the Dell drivers. I've also tweaked the graphics settings a bit and I'm getting much higher and smoother FPS, comparable to Vista. So I take back what I said before about XP performance being worse.

 

Can anyone clarify whether the newer versions have it?

 

I think all the newer versions have it...
its like a milestone, once you reach it, you cant go back..

so im assuming that all the versions after 175.19, having reached that ''standard'', MUST, and HAVE TO support that 'special shader optimization'... again, correct me if i'm mistaken.

 

I like the 169.28 best

 

Currently loving 177.89, better then stock and the version I used in jan-feb time. It all will depend on what works for you, and the OC is the biggest issue as every laptop will be different. You could have two identical laptops with the exact same specs and maintenance and both will work different per OC you apply.