video card drivers in xp/vista

hey all, I know some of us use xp on the mbp to run games, what I was thinking is maby there could be a driver sticky.

like include diffrent drivers people have had work on the mbp. for example. I know the base ones on the driver disk made by bootcamp are really slow. but you can get better ones on http://www.laptopvideo2go.com however some of thoes are even slower or dont work, and some run hotter ect...

maby a sticky with video driver info people have found or so hen the new drivers from nvidia are released me or someone can test it to see if it is better or worse ect...

just an idea, I know it can be searched for to get the awnser. but it seems really split up and even then it dosnt seem to really be updated to often.

also I know there are stickys on the other boards like the gaming one but it dosnt center on the mbp.

Thanks
Bob

 

well, the thing is that inherently mbp is an intel/nvidia notebook, so everything what applies to any other laptop applies here too.

I personally tried bootcamp, 163.64,163.69,163.71

The 3dmark06 performance is bootcamp < 163.71 < 163.79 < 163.64 but 163.71 is no beta so it will be used now. Too bad overclocking isn't yet possible with 163 series(I haven't tried rivatuner 2.05 yet though)

 

well I have heard about some of the drivers causeing bsod on the mbp hardware ( it is nvidia / intel based ) cause of slight diffrences in the video card stock settings ( 3rd party config on the card ) while working fine on other laptops.

 

Maybe I just did something wrong, but all the drivers i've downloaded(Even from nvidia) would cause my mbp to crash whenever i tried to play a game. Only thing I could do to fix it was to reinstall the drivers that came with the bootcamp drivers cd. So I can second bobstone on that.

 

nVidia drivers from don't officially support the 8600m series which could the cause of the problems with those drivers. I've been running 163.44 drivers from laptopvideo2go which worked fine on the Bioshock and Jericho demos.

Somewhat tricky thing with laptopvideo2go is that you need to check the release date, not the version number, for newest releases and its forums will contain even newer released versions with user feedback on them.

 

laptopvideo2go is organized pretty strangely. I strongly recommend nit04's advice that you go to the actual forums instead of the driver section (which will link you to the forums anyway; it's just not updated as frequently).

rivatuner 2.05 will allow you to OC the 160 series, although I had some trouble actually pushing it very high (like to factory specs). But I'm not very experienced in overclocking, so someone else will have to help you there.

on the vista side, i've used 163.44, 69, 71, and 74 with little to no problems. Sometimes (read often) laptopvideo2go will throw up odd links and modded infs that aren't completely modded, which will be very quickly evident as you try to install them or as people start posting. Just wait a few days or a week or two after each release and check the comments of each release before installing.

 

I dunno I'm currently running the nVIDIA ForceWare X 163.75 for Windows Vista 32bit and it's very smooth.

 

ok, speaking of o/c what has any one reached with out to much of a temp raise useing rivatuner,

 

ok well I forgot to write down the orignal driver I was useing ( not bootcamp one ) but here is the diffrence I got from swtching to a new one

on orignal ( non boot camp ) maby 162.18 is what I got in my head for some reason

3d mark 05 = 6538 on stock options in pro with all the tests, 1024x768 res
3d mark 06 = 3183 stock options non pro at 1280x1024


just installed the 163.75
3d mark 05 = 8067 with all the same settings as old driver
3d mark 06 = 3945 again with same settings as above

so I see a large improvement with the new drivers

another reason I want to have something like this easy to check is I heard that the 163.71 driver is really fast but has some compatiblity issues

as far as my current compatability 162.18 ran everthing with no errors. I have not tested the 163.75 yet

my next test is to try over clocking it to a safe level

I will update with that info

 

bobstone, Why not post in the MBP Overclocking Thread?

 

lol didnt even notice that thread

 

There are some other benchmark threads in the Apple Forum too: Results from A Search for "3DMark".

I usually just read the LaptopVideo2Go Forums and the NBR Gaming Forum to evaluate newly released drivers.