What on *EARTH* is going on with my 8600m?!?!

OK, so after a few dreamy weeks overclocked with the 169.09 drivers, I decide to take the plunge with and upgrad to 169.17. Since then it's been nothing but trouble. RivaTuner wouldn't let me overclock and neither would ATiTool, and the pattern continued until I downgraded one by one until I got back to 169.04.

So now I'm with the laptopvideo2go 169.04 drivers, and after pumping up the core and memory on RivaTuner lo and behold, I'm getting 4600 even in 3dmark06! Woohoo!

So I fire up UT3 and, what's this? 20fps! Impossible! I check Ntune and it's telling me my core clock is somehow stuck at 168 MhZ, and my memory at 100MhZ! What the eff? I fire up 3dmark06 again, and what's is my score? 725!!!!

This has been going on so much, I can't figure it out. I hear here there and everywhere something about Powermizer, but as far as I can tell, the laptopvideo2go drivers are not mobile drivers, so it makes sense that I have never once seen "Powermizer" on my computer.

Can anybody lend me a bone here? What on earth is going on?!

 

Try changing the clocks if they don't change then I think you have the same issue I have. How far did you try to overclock? Whenever my card overheats it will clock itself to 168/100 and won't let me change my clocks till I restart my computer.

 

Maybe it's an overheating issue, as you say.

I rebooted and everything went back to normal, albeit I have never been able to reach the 4500s in 3Dmark06 again.

Seeing as how we're probably in the same boat, what drivers have you found work best for you? It's funny because very often I get the exact same 3dmark06 score before overclocking as I do after significant overclocks. I can't explain it.

I'm thinking of switching over to the 163 series...

 

p.s. the overclock I had at the time, and still have, is 580/(1160) and 761.

What's working out well for you?

 

yoou have the ddr3 card right? what laptop? It might be better to ask owners of the same laptop as yours.

Mine is the ddr2 card and my clocks are 560/490.

I'm using the 169.04 drivers by the way. I can overclock the same or more basically. No huge difference.

 

Yes they are...that's the reason we use them...

Did you install the modified .inf file before running setup? Powermizer will appear in the Nvidia options panel. It should only kick in once you are on battery power though.

 

I certainly have downloaded the modded .INF and cut/pasted it into the unpacked driver folder.

No idea why I don't have powermizer, then....

 

FYI, vista doesn't have powermizer options you can change. I only say this because you did not say if you were using xp or not