New nVidia Drivers - Lower Performance?

[tjmaxwell]

Hey all,

I have an A64 3200+ rig with 1GB Ram, and a 6800GT card from BFG. I got the card about a week ago and initially loaded the drivers from the CD. I was able to achieve rock-solid stability at 420 MHz with 1.1 GHz memory. I scored about 12,200 in 3DMarko03 with this setup, and UT2K4/Far Cry ran perfectly without a hitch.

Since installing the new nVidia drivers, 420MHz is no longer stable. The machine crashed and rebooted itself once during 3DMark, and the second time, it seemed like it locked during the Mother Nature test, but kicked back in a few seconds later and only scored about 11,400. Furthermore, I'm seeing blinking patches of color and other oddities while playing Far Cry (which I've patched to 1.2).

Should I consider going back to the drivers on the CD?

 

[JBT]

I do notice aswell that it lowered my OC for 3dmark but I really don't use that much anyways. It never rebooted but it has frozen for a few seconds when I have a high OC (425/1140). If I back down a touch it runs it fine (420/1120). You can try the old drivers if you like and think they are better. Did you install over the top of the old drivers or did you uninstall and run driver cleaner??? if not I would recommend doing so.

 

[tjmaxwell]

I uninstalled the drivers through the control panel before installing, but I didn't use any other kind of tool.

 

[Keysplayr]

Run your card at the rated stock speeds. That should resolve your problem.

 

[jiffylube1024]

What versions? "New drivers" is very unspecifit - there have been several WHQL updates in the past couple of months.

Also, did you make sure that you fully uninstalled the old drivers with DriverCleaner 2.0? If not, the lower performance could be caused in part by conflicting driver versions.

I'm not doubting your results, but more specific details would be helpful .

 

[CRXican]

I didn't use any cleaning crap and the new 61.72 drivers work fine on my PC, just installed right over the ones that came off the disc