HP's Driver, Any Advantages? [8400 GS]

Currently I'm using a driver from laptop2video. But I also know that HP provides their own driver. What I'm wondering is, considering especially power usage, does the HP driver offer any specific power saving ricky ticks as opposed to laptop2video's?

 

Generally it is best to use the official driver for your particular hardware. As to your actual question an official driver may have a power saving effect because I have noticed that modded drivers do not always tap into the settings they display options for (for example i have modded drivers equipped with a smart dimmer power saving feature which seems to do nothing!). All you can really do to test is download a testing program and try both drivers.

Grand Admiral

 

Trust me, the laptopvideo2go drivers are much better than the hp stock drivers in all ways

 

What I found with the official drivers (think it was 156.65?), there was no smartdimmer. So once i upgraded to 169.09 smartdimmer showed up and it works to. So I use the modded drivers. Basically the only thing HP does, is test it to see if everything works with the driver, and maybe a few small enhancement.

 

HP drivers are just old. LV2G keeps up with the times, and even releases betas. HP, or any manufacturer, only releases a driver every year or so.

 

True. If you want to game alittle, then download the newest drivers from Laptopvideo2go, it's the smartest choice.

 

Thanks for the answers. Can one underclock the card with laptop2video drivers? I tried checking with rivatuner, but I get all kinds of warnings that the driver isn't reckognized and such. Just want to know if anyone done it.

 

Why would u wanna underclock a gpu? Im guessing its to save battery...GPU only use power it needs dynamically

Its undervolting your after...

 

Thing is, after reading about how powermizer might not work properly in Vista, I thought maybe the best bet for it to actually work somehow in the background was to use HP's drivers.

 

well as far as i know powermizer works in the background more in vista, the only thing you really see is the smartdimmer in vista (which i only got to work with LV2G drivers) you can see how your system is dynamically ajusting clock speeds by downloading NTUNE and it will show you the clock speeds and temps

 

I am using the microsoft update driver 7.15.11.6743 It actually gives me a higher graphics (aero) subscore of 3.2 The laptopvideo driver only produced a 3.1 subscore.

Processor 4.8
Memory 4.8
Graphics 3.2
Gaming graphics 4.5
Hard disk 4.7

This is a pretty new windows update driver.. I noticed a big boost. I think overall performance is better then the laptopvideo driver. Fan seems to run a little less. I have the newer bios f33 which seems to keep the fan noise down.
I just wish I could get the aero performance better but the 8400m gs 128 is not that great for the aero 2d desktop.

 

I wouldn't trust window's score. If one wanted to compare performances for different drivers for their graphics card, one should really run a proper benchmark tool.

 

I got 3.5 for video and mines only a 8400gs 64mb (lv2go 169.09). Talk about inaccuracy in benchmarking

 

I got a 4.0 for the graphics and I'm using the 169.04 drivers for the 8400m GS

 

I tried the laptop2go drivers and had driver errors trying to run HD-DVD playback. Had to roll back the drivers to the last MS update for the laptop. Anyone else seen this?

 

I would never use the WEI to compare how well the drivers are working. All the WEI is good for is helping people that know barely anything about computers know if their computer is decent enough to run Vista. If you really want to see how well the drivers are working go and do a 3dMark and then tell us the scores of the different drivers.

The best drivers I've used for laptops so far have been from laptop2go. HP's drivers on their website are always old, HP barely every updates their drivers. The only time you will truly see HP update them real fast is when their is a known problem and many people are complaining. All you need to do is go to the manufacturer's website to get the latest drivers.