Nvidia driver 174.74 is awesome!

No the drivers supplied by your hardware manufacturer should be WHQL'd. But as we all know laptop manufacturers do not do much in the way of graphics card drivers-they go a bit overkill on the testing and so it takes them a very long time IMO.

 

1- Changing drivers. Easy, uninstall the old one. Download one of your choice from laptopvideo2go, Get the modded inf from there whilst you're at it, extract the files to somewhere sensible, Copy the modded inf into that folder replacing as necessary, run setup. agree to installing an unsigned driver. away you go.

2- Overclocking, try one of the plethora of tools that are designed to overclock your gpu. I use rivatuner or failing that ntune and only move the core and memory a little at a time, testing by playing games to see if it is stable. One thing to note. KEEP an eye on the GPU temp so it doesn't rocket up too much-it will increase a bit as you're going to get more heat from an oc'd card.
It's easy enough really, you just have to be conservative with your settings to begin with.

EDIT: sorry about "1" I've just read your post and realized you must of done this as you're running 174.74 drivers.

 

Oh and a last thing. Has anyone had any warranty concerns with Dell regarding overclocking?

 

Never expected to see you here lol

Not alot of people fry their GPU's, only idiots that try to OC to twice the power of their card. Theres alot of fail-safe measures built-in these days to make GPU's idiot proof

OC'ing voids manufacturer warranty definately....except they have no way of finding out if you fried your GPU from OC'ing. Cause it dies the same fashion a normal GPU would die.

Just remove rivatuner or format your HD before you send it in for a service and your in the clear

 

Im exploring....just wondering what I can do to better things. I wouldn't want to push it to the edge and conversely, would be a bit concerned with heat gain. My system heats up enough when I connect my 22" external with HDMI

 

Can someone please tell me where I can download the 174.74 drivers with a modified .inf that supports 8600m GT for the dell m1530 laptop on vista 32bit? THANKS!

 

www.laptopvideo2go.com

 

Even more precise : http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18049
I just looked,there`s .93 now

 

I recently changed my old HP nx9420 (ati x1600 256DDR2) and bought MSI gx700px (8600gt 512DDR2). These are by far the best drivers I have tried in this short time (I tried 3 drivers already btw). As you know me for being an ATI OC enthusiast (have tried everything from memory latencies to advanced registry settings) - I can say Nvidia is just as easy to set, but I find nvidia drivers more unstable than ATI. I experienced huge differences between different versions - from not being able to oc to BSODs and resets and finally with these drivers - everything went OK! Nvidia is far behind ATI in drivers (atleast for Vista) regardless what other people say.

Nevertheless - thank you for bringing these out since the other ones that were like "good" (g extreme or something) are actually much worse than these. I can overclock more now, and they are very stable.TF2 runs at 1680x1050, without AA, but with anisotropic at 2x on 8600 DDR2 at 60-70 fps when I am alone, 40tish in the middle of battle, all other things except HDR are on max. The drivers before these could pull that at 1280x800 only! That is a huge difference once you see it.

3dmark06 went up to 4020 (not bad for ddr2 card) when overclocked to 630/490. But I don't care about 3dmark - games are now visibly faster.

From now on I am looking only for laptop2go drivers and their little infs. BTW what about 174.31? Should I try those as well? Since I still kinda see little jerkyness in player movement in CSS from time to time.

Another thing - my LCD (and driver) has 59Hz refresh rate only. Has anyone seen problems with 59Hz (except battlefield that will not start because of that?). Some tests in 3dmark06 look very jerky - like very slow frames and then very fast catching up every second or so. Could that be turbocache perhaps?

Cheers,

Ivan

 

quick question - i downloaded the .74 driver and extracted it into a folder. then i downloaded the modded inf file and when i drag it into the extracted folder, there is nothing that prompts me to "overwrite" anything. can someone tell me what to do, i don't want to install the driver if the modded inf did not do what it was supposed to do (overwrite).

thanks

 

nope you are not overwriting anything. just put the inf there and start the driver installation from device manager.

 

can't find 174.74 only 174.93 174.32 174.88 ? go to nvidia and download from their site then install the mod? or use one that i listed?

okay went to the nvidia site and found the 174.74 beta driver and snagged it. i will follow the printed instructions from laptop2go site and all should be well. i did snag the modded inf from there.

 

is this the best for a 7950 too? any opinions?

 

Hey Les, Tom's Hardware just posted an excellent GPU OCing guide http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-graphics-card,1916.html , (though I've never done the BIOS OC they describe as an option). but yah OCing is v/ safe and you can boost your already ridiculously high PCMark05 score.

 

No dude, the best for a 7950GTX from my standpoint is your pick from 169.44 , 174.82 and 174.93

 

i did the install tonight of the 174.74 drivers and so far all is well. tomorrow i will run a game or two and see how it goes. i ran the high def trailer of Ironman and it looked awesome. can't wait to see this movie!!