United Kingdom
I'm making this post, just because of the grief I have had trying to update my drivers on both Vista and Windows 7 (Ultimate editions)
Previously had a 6600gt and 7900gs, only once remember having to use a driver cleaner with these cards, and found out the Nvidia installer was corrupt, so redownloading solved that problem.
OK now upto date, replaced my failed 7900gs (pc startup looked like it was wearing a pinstripe suit), with a nice new Palit Sonic gt 220, just the type of card that pretty much ideal for a htpc (will be when the passive editions arrive in the shops), This I installed on 2 new installs of Vista\Win7.
The card came with driver 190.45 plus the bundled Vtune software for over clocking if you wish, now this all installed fine, everything works except 1280x720 just overscans!! (7900gs never did this using 186 driver)
Now most of the driver updates between 190.45 and 195.62 did not contain anything I wanted, but the last contained the flash HD dxva enhancement, so I downloaded it from the Nvidia.co.uk site, now the nightmare begins.
This was all done with no antivirus or other software in place, only the barebones of a brand new OS, with drivers installed and internet access, windows updates set to advise of new only.
Uninstalled old drivers (graphics\physx\audio) rebooted windows installs standard vga driver, yippee this gives 1280x720 unaccelerated desktop.
Now try installing new drivers, before running the installer, disabled Vtune overclocking software just in case It interfered with the installation., continued letting the Nvidia download exe do its thing and reboot at the end as instructed.
Now non stop crashes on the desktop with display driver has stopped responding errors and finally te dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD)
Since the above have tried safe mode\driver sweeper prior to installing, still get exactly the same thing, have worked my way through the current range of drivers upto 196.34 beta and everyone does the same thing at some point.
Over at the Nvidia forums, there are posts regarding this (driver feedback), think I may have a clue why the problems are occuring, my gpu is overclocked by default to 650Mhz against the standard 625Mhz for the 216 chip, this causes no problem whatsoever with 190.45 or earlier driver, however i I downclock to exactly 625 (626 causes BSOD
) then the driver behaves itself, until something graphically challenging appears (playing HD video) then display drivers fail again.
So as a conclusion, I consider current Nvidia drivrs unusable.
Regards
Previously had a 6600gt and 7900gs, only once remember having to use a driver cleaner with these cards, and found out the Nvidia installer was corrupt, so redownloading solved that problem.
OK now upto date, replaced my failed 7900gs (pc startup looked like it was wearing a pinstripe suit), with a nice new Palit Sonic gt 220, just the type of card that pretty much ideal for a htpc (will be when the passive editions arrive in the shops), This I installed on 2 new installs of Vista\Win7.
The card came with driver 190.45 plus the bundled Vtune software for over clocking if you wish, now this all installed fine, everything works except 1280x720 just overscans!! (7900gs never did this using 186 driver)
Now most of the driver updates between 190.45 and 195.62 did not contain anything I wanted, but the last contained the flash HD dxva enhancement, so I downloaded it from the Nvidia.co.uk site, now the nightmare begins.
This was all done with no antivirus or other software in place, only the barebones of a brand new OS, with drivers installed and internet access, windows updates set to advise of new only.
Uninstalled old drivers (graphics\physx\audio) rebooted windows installs standard vga driver, yippee this gives 1280x720 unaccelerated desktop.
Now try installing new drivers, before running the installer, disabled Vtune overclocking software just in case It interfered with the installation., continued letting the Nvidia download exe do its thing and reboot at the end as instructed.
Now non stop crashes on the desktop with display driver has stopped responding errors and finally te dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD)
Since the above have tried safe mode\driver sweeper prior to installing, still get exactly the same thing, have worked my way through the current range of drivers upto 196.34 beta and everyone does the same thing at some point.
Over at the Nvidia forums, there are posts regarding this (driver feedback), think I may have a clue why the problems are occuring, my gpu is overclocked by default to 650Mhz against the standard 625Mhz for the 216 chip, this causes no problem whatsoever with 190.45 or earlier driver, however i I downclock to exactly 625 (626 causes BSOD
) then the driver behaves itself, until something graphically challenging appears (playing HD video) then display drivers fail again.So as a conclusion, I consider current Nvidia drivrs unusable.
Regards
