New HDD installed. Which Nvidia drivers?

Hello all :hi2:
So as some of you know, i was having some system troubles lately and have decided to purchase a brand new hard drive, starting over clean and clear.
Well I'm terrified of choosing which nvidia driver to go with for my 680m. My main problem for a long time was never finding a driver that would stop crashing all the time. Does anyone have legit information on the most stable and safe driver to use ? I dont care if its the oldest one for the 600m series even. I just dont want to get one that's faulty again because I hear that it can damage your windows install. Any insight would be very appreciated

 

bit pointless info but the best driver nvidia ever released was 186.81 about 4 years ago.

im still running 314.22 and havnt had a single problem with it.

a lot of the time its just trial and error as what will affect one person will not affect someone else with exactly the same set up.
if you are a frames per second kind of guy then you will want the latest drivers to try and get more frames in game.
if you are a general user like me that games but is not interested in frames then find a driver thats stable and stick with it. you can upgrade to the latest and if its not as good then just roll back.

 

Running 306.14 WHQL from the driver disc that xotixPC gave me from day one. I installed battlefield 3 and got to play for a whole 10 minutes. The screen went black, and i was forced to alt+tab out to the desktop to close through alt+control+delete. The only message I got after doing that was "Battlefield3.exe has stopped responding " blah blah.
Nothing to go off of that gives me a useful answer. Needless to say, im getting rather pissed off at this point. I payed the extra money for Nvidia because everyone said they were more stable than the 7970. But I find that very hard to believe at this point. What's my next move?
p.s. i looked up that driver on google and can only find windows 8 stuff...I have windows 7. Maybe xotic gave me the wrong driver? I have no clue...But I've been wanting to play games since February without all these shenanigans.

 

start downloading all the whql released after 306.14 which are quite old drivers > NVIDIA Driver Downloads - Advanced Search

and try one by one.
and trust me, nvidia drivers are in a different league compared to ati.

B3 is quite a difficult one as its such a demanding game. what sort of temperatures are you getting while playing for 10 minutes (lots of monitoring software in sig below).
i had exactly the same for 3 different nvidia drivers. great gameplay until it crashed before the end of each round. then i finally found the next driver i loaded stopped the crashing and ive stuck with it.

does it crash while you play any other games?

 

My cpu is hovering around 50c at idle...which seems a bit high to me. In game in got to 75c.
my gpu barely got to 68c..I haven't had a chance to test it with other games yet since this a fresh install on a brand new drive. I haven't randomly blue screened yet so that's exciting..I'm installing Crysis 2 right now because on the last drive, it crashed during the opening cinematic. I ran memtest a few nights ago for 8 hours and got 8 passes. So it's not my RAM

 

those temps are perfectly fine and nothing to worry about. 90c+ start worrying

crysis 2 oh what fun i had with that game on release day. loaded game and server. ran game and it froze. wasnt hard drive but a dead 9800gt graphics card.

 

I don't think my gpu is dead...It wouldn't make a lot of sense. I don't even want to think about the RMA nightmare phase. Went through that with Alienware years ago.
I just used driver sweeper to get rid of my old driver and now im updating to 314.22 to give that a whirl. One of the things that worries me is, can I find a driver that works with ALL my games? Or do I have to pick and choose one that works for only most of them. It seems that when i replace a driver to fix one games problems, other games have troubles sometimes.

 

sorry only mentioned my gpu as you mentioned crysis 2. wont be your gpu so dont worry there.

oh and ive also been there with the nightmare with alienware after my m15x fiasco and thats how i found clevo through this forum and have stuck with them ever since.

only game ive had problems with is B3 and the drivers have worked for all other games so hopefully once you get B3 sorted the others should be fine as well.

as you use driver sweeper do you use it in safe mode. thats how ive aways done it as im old skool (full walkthrough in sig below).

 

No worries I actually did driver sweeper and installed 314.22 just through windows, before reading your last post. I just played three rounds of battlefield 3 with no hiccups at all! that's at least 300% better than before. Going to play later today with a friend and see if it keeps up . My CPU Temp ( package ) got to 85c, and my 680 got to 82c. That's after 3 rounds. Not running on ultra just because i dont see the need. Most things are on high. Anyways, time to test with more games! If I run into anymore problems i will let you guys know. I used to have the original m15x as well with an 8800 gtx...nightmare city. Those hinges combined with constant crashing were enough to make me consider throwing it off a building. Thanks for your help as always This forum is always so helpful. cheers! :thumbsup:

 

your welcome mate. hope its finally sorted it.

oh the hinge problem. that sure was a problem. im guessing you was one of the unlucky ones that milcs added to his post. 30 broken hinges within 6 weeks.
my problem wasnt the hinge but everything else.
dead cpu and 8800gtx within 19 days. sent back for repair and they sent me someone elses laptop in return. cancelled and bought a clevo and havnt looked back ever since.

 

Have you had troubles since your re-install? There is something else going on if you gets lots of issues with different sets now.

 

No, I haven't had any error messages or freezes since the reinstall. Only with the default driver that xotic sent to me.
After removing that driver and going to 314.22, everything has been peachy so far