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    Driver advice for those of you running 8800 gtx/9800m gt

    Discussion in 'Alienware Area-51/Aurora and Legacy Systems' started by usmc1488, Oct 30, 2010.

  1. usmc1488

    usmc1488 Notebook Evangelist

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    A couple easy days of work has enabled me to play around with my old Area51 M17x. Ive been trying to find the best video driver for our video cards. Ive been able to run the newest verde drives (260.xx) but my master video card has been getting too hot (even with AS5) at about 97C after playing the new MOH for a half hour, the slave was reaching about 75C. I was getting excelent frame rates (avg 55fps for MOH on all max settings). I ran the new Hawx II bench rest on 1900/1280 res all settings max, no aa, and no vsnych with a highest FPS of 119 and avg of 68. One big side effect I noticed was that the slave card's clock was maxing out at 500mhz when I wasnt playing a game or even surfing the net.

    Today I wiped the drivers, installed the old 181.xx series of drivers, added the latest SLI profile, and the latest phycs profile from nvidia. The results are surprising. Hawx II bench jumped to 126 FPS max and an avg fps of 78!! The higest temps GPU-z recorded after a half hour playing of MOH was 81 for the master and 60 for the slave! SLI and Physx were turned on and I was still seeing an avg of 55FPS!!!!

    Im not sure what the newest serries of drivers are doing to our cards but if you use an older driver and update the SLI and phycs profiles you will have an updated system that still runs fast (as exhibited by mine) with out the newest serries of drivers issues (BSOD's, hot cards, etc).
     
    usmc1488, Oct 30, 2010
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  2. madrabbit711

    madrabbit711 Notebook Consultant

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    The only reason I'm interested in the latest drivers is the possibility of CUDA.
     
    madrabbit711, Nov 2, 2010
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  3. usmc1488

    usmc1488 Notebook Evangelist

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    What does CUDA do anyway? Im thinking the extra 3d Drives that 99.9% of us arent using are adding to the heat and stress of our cards.
     
    usmc1488, Nov 2, 2010
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  4. wdmalik

    wdmalik Notebook Consultant

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    Agreed, i wasn't able to access why my GPU temperatures were suddenly on the higher side, well it ended up in burning my both GPUs .. :(
     
    wdmalik, Nov 2, 2010
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  5. madrabbit711

    madrabbit711 Notebook Consultant

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    My understanding of CUDA...very low understanding...is that CUDA allows CPU processing to occur on the GPU.

    What is CUDA?

    For me this would be great for a gaming as I'm not so fussed about the latest and greatest graphics but I like good gameplay. For example with a game like ArmA2 which is very, VERY CPU hungry due to all the AI it runs really slow on my m15x (and apparently a lot of other peoples computers as well!).

    So hopefully I could off-load some of the CPU power I need and am not getting from the Core 2 Duo on the under-utilised GPU.

    Just a theory though...
     
    madrabbit711, Nov 3, 2010
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