Upgraded Drivers for Geforce 6400

Hello,

I finally undertook the task of upgrading the drivers for my Geforce 6400 to overcome the castrated driver properties window and have access to all settings (Powermizer, etc)

It's not as difficult as I thought, it seems the Nvidia drivers for Desktop computers can easily be transformed to "mobile" drivers. Instructions can be found here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/pages/instructions.htm

I've installed the 81.95 Detonators, the installation went without problems and everything seems to be working fine. I'll be testing with a few games in the near future to see if there are any performance increases as well.

 

i have updated the 70.87 version from Sony with the 77.72 driver found on lv2go recently and was running some benchmark tools to check the improvement. i was very surprised to see that the performanced increased by upto 25%.

but first one should install the registry tweak coolbits 2.0 to unlock the nvidia menu. this also gives you access to the overclocking utilty.

i got a Vaio S3 with GF6200go graphics. 3dMark 2003 before optimization was 2369, 2678 with the 77.72 driver and 3009 with a moderate overclocking. in 3dMark05 i got from 800 to 1000 points, with the 80.40 driver to 1140 points!

regards,
Martin

 

Bomfunk - Can you explain how to do it step by step?

Stausi - What are the hidden nvidia menus and how do you access them.

I am asking these two dumb questions because I wonder the benefits of doing so.

My point is why wouldn't Sony give us the access to these menus and driver upgrades if we were meant to do so?

If I were a marketing guy on Sony I'd do my best to increase the performance of my product's graphics processor by 25%.

So by reverse engineering I come to the conclusion that one way or another these things have some handicaps.

Don't think me as a standard rule guy. You'd be suprized of the amount of tweaking that I do. I just wanted bring the issue up.

 

I think the reason why Sony didn't give the user access to the advanced menus is simply because they don't want the standard notebook user to start fiddling with settings like the clock speed of the GPU and then come to Sony because they've destroyed their new toy. I absolutely don't know why Sony hasn't released an updated driver, other manufacturers have..

Step 1: Download and extract Detonator Drivers from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/

Step 2: Download and extract the modded *.inf File into the same Directory

Step 3: Click on "Update Driver" in your graphics card properties.

Step 4: Follow Step 9-15 on http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/pages/instructions.htm

Step 5: Reboot your Computer .> finished.

 

as for the 6400 card, i've tested this card with hl2, and there seems to be a slight chug to it, every so often the frame would pause then continue when the fps would drop dramatically.

 

What I'd like to know is whether the driver switch can improve performance on the 6400 without overclocking or otherwise increasing power consumption and heat output. I have no complaints thus far about the 6400 in my S580 (haven't tried HL2 yet) but I'd just as soon get as much performance as the card will give me.

Also, davez82, could you tell us what notebook configuration you tried this in (CPU, RAM, and screen resolution in particular) and what settings you tried in HL2?

 

im on a fs745, also when shutting down windows (not hibernate) i get a nvidia error, this doesnt prevent the shutdown its just kind of annoying. i think its nvdc32.exe or something like, its teh exe for the nvidia help program i think, this happened after i upgraded my drivers. My hl2 is on high quality, it runs ok just has that stutter, it might just be that the vcard is too slow, no idea though.

 

Hi davez,

I just tested HL2 and I don't have the problem you've been reporting about. What driver version are you using? I activated the display of the fps and it fluctuates like it normally does but there is no pause or dramatic drop all of a sudden.
What kind of frame rates to you get? What exactly are your settings in HL2? Do you have Antialiasing and/or Antisotropic filtering activated?

 

no antialiasing or af, im also having another problem where the dvd playback doesnt work after updating drivers, says video card is in use in viaozone.

 

Hmm that's weird.. Maybe you should try to completely uninstall the drivers before upgrading. I couldn't find much use in Vaiozone so I removed it from startup.

 

well i like viao zone and still want to use it , what are the steps to completely uninstalling drivers

 

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Software then locate "NVidia Drivers" and click on Change/Remove, then reboot and reinstall the Nvidia drivers.

 

Well, I downloaded the nVidia 81.98 driver from laptopvideo2go.com, but I have the very same problem davez82 is experiencing (no dvd playback and no way I can play Age of Empires III). I even tried to completely uninstall the 77.42 driver before upgrading to 81.98 but I wasn’t successful so I rolled back to Sony stock driver (77.42).
Any idea about why this happens?

 

I'm not sure if I have the same problem as davez82 and EPluribusUnum. I downloaded the xtreme-g_mobileforce811_95-v2_24 driver because I could not play Counter-Strike Source at full screen. After that, I got dvd playback problems with windows media player and windvd for VAIO. For WMP, only audio would play and with Windvd it gave me a video overlay problem. Then, I used VLC Media player and every thing worked fine. The website for the player is http://www.videolan.org

 

Thanks for your help! I'm still trying to figure out how to have WMP correctly playback DVDs under newer (newer than 77.42) nVidia drivers.