Effects of custom display drivers?

I'm still running on pretty much stock XP SP2 from Xotic on my 570RU. (I did apply the multi-core patch, but it didn't show up so I think Xotic/Sager had already installed it.)

So far I've not bothered with any of the newer drivers for the 8700M, despite seeing huge performance increases reported here. ie: Things run pretty well so far. Time is tight (have a newborn around so buggering drivers up is low on my priorities these days

The latest drivers are for the desktop cards, and the various lads mod the inf file so they can be installed on notebooks. People comment about this resulting in always running OC'd and thus running hot all the time (fans on, and higher battery usage as a result).

Is this true?

ie: What are the latest drivers one can update to that still have notebook functionality, yet still increase performance?

If you go to the very latest, whats the real implications aside better performance? I don't really want to run at max-performance on the GPU all the time .. just while in games

Thanks for any tips,

jeff

Edit: Another question -- are the newer modded drivers any less compatible with games than the recommended stable official ones? ie: So far I've never had any problems with the current drivers, but they perform slower; the newer modded or official drivers, being specifically tweaked for Crysis and such.. are they less compatible for older titles by chance?

 

In my experience (I initially used modded drivers for my HP Pavilion dv6519tx and am pretty sure im using modded drivers now) modded drivers can be unstable. I had a few gaming problems with my first set but generally if your only using Windows they do the job. Additional GPU usage and heat can result from using modded drivers although some will detect you're using a laptop and give you the option to enable power saving features (My NVIDIA 8400M does). For some reason I'm told no major graphics companies support laptop cards directly from their websites, you have to go through the manufacturer. So check your manufacturers website first for fully-compatible drivers. I tried running Unreal Tournament (the original) on my laptop and it wont tolerate it whereas my only slightly older desktop will so compatibility can be troublesome. However my current drivers (which im pretty sure are modded) run newer games like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Battlefront II with no problems.

You can PM me with any further questions

Grand Admiral

 

u might find the drivers u want on laptopvideo2go u can look there and check there forum

 

Ah, didn't know they had a forum.

In general though .. if you're using modded video driver, you're going to be running your GPU OC'd all the time?

Whats the latest Nvidea driver that is actually friendly to notebooks?

If only we could have driver profiles.. I'd run in 'safe profile' except when gaming, then switch to all crazy modded OC'd drivers

jeff

 

OC as in Overclocked? That cant be right, my drivers dont run overclocked unless i tell them and you need NVIDIA nTune to do it. My current driver (163.71) has PowerMizer features so anything later than that and probably much earlier as well should have it. Not sure how effective it is but you can try it

Grand Admiral

 

Using the "modded" drivers will not run your video card overclocked all the time. They can depending on the drivers you are using now allow you to overclock your video card, not all of the released drivers support this. Currently if you go to nvidia's web site and download the latest driver it is stable. If you want to try the beta driver 169.04 or is stable for me, I have heard that 169.09 is about the same as 169.04 just fixed some minor glitches with new games.

As for problems with power savings it depnds on how you enable your settings all of nvidia cards supprot this but the laptops do a better job because they already run at lower power consumption. I have found no real differrence in time on battery between the 2 types of drivers maybe a minute or two.

In the end you are the one that has to make the decsion to use the drivers or not. I do and I am happy with them the performance gains are a acceptable to me and I have not had any problems with them in the last 3 years. I have an INF file that I have looked over and modded myself and download the drivers from nvida directly. It works very well for me. I have also looked over the INF from laptopvideo2go and I have not seen any issues in it and would consider it safe to use as well.

 

Just installing a modded driver won't OC your card...you have to do that manually...it's just that some drivers allow for OCing, while others don't.

 

Great -- sounds like its pretty safe and conservative to upgrade to modded drivers.. its just they also let you go nasty if you like.

So now the question.. which driver version/family to get .. hmm

jeff