[t61p] Using non lenovo video drivers

This might be very old news for some of you, but I just found this out and I'd like to share and hear opinions.

So I am using t61p with windows 7 64 bit and I noticed that with the official lenovo video driver the gpu gets abnormally hot. Yet I didn't try any other driver, because I thought that only lenovo drivers would be fully compatible with this laptop. Laptopvideo2go drivers used to be buggy in my experience. Anyhow it seemed only one video driver was released by lenovo for windows 7 64 bit for the t61p. I think more people thought that too (why else get drivers from laptopvideo2go?). But that's simply not true.
For example the driver on the nvidia site for 570m ( NVIDIA DRIVERS 258.96 WHQL) now also is the same driver for the 8600mgt. "Turning your quadro into a geforce" makes no sense anymore. Even better: this driver has a specific lenovo inf file, so it should be 100% compatible.

So when my t61p gets back from repairs I will try out this new driver and I expect some gameperformance gain and a drop in temperature. Anymore experiences/opinions about this?

Let me know if I am completely wrong here, though.... I will delete post asap then.

 

At the moment I am using a driver from NVIDIA with version number 8.17.11.9716 or 197.16 for short. I have notably better stability with this driver than past official drivers from Lenovo. I didn't do any performance tests or benchmarking before and after to see if there was a difference, but the fact that the issues with heat and stability are gone made the former aspect irrelevant (to me anyways).

 

I starting using the newest NVIDIA driver(the one you linked to) and it does seem as though my my temps are alot lower, haven't seen any real world performance increase but it can't help to use it, especially since the lenovo driver is over a year old.

 

My laptop came back from repairs, so I did a few test.

lenovo driver 3dmark06: 41xx
nvidia driver 3dmark06: 43xx

Not so big, but still a few %...

Temperature was better though. When I did three runs in a row with the lenovo driver the score would lower to 32xx (double checked that!), because I suppose the machine clocked back because of heat, with the nvidia I got consistent scores of 43xx.

Also the temperature after the benchmark with lenovo driver would be mid 80's while with nvidia I got mid 70's.

Much improved indeed, I am happy about this!

 

I tried out both the NVIDIA and the latest lenovo driver that is fully win 7 64bit compatible and really saw no real world differences. In fact, windows experience in graphics dropped a bit with the NVIDIA drivers. I did not really test the temps or scores but again in everyday computing/gaming I saw absolutely no difference and thus currently running the lenovo drivers.

 

i am not sure how the new nvidia driver is going to improve the performance of the GPU but at the same time dropping the temp....