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Krayzie, Tony, anyone... please help!

post #1 of 8
4/5/07 at 1:55am
Thread Starter 
Alright, I have been using Vista for a little over 2 months now and have been enjoying every minute of it. Especially now that the driver 101.41 (M6) was released and I finally got the performance that I had back in the XP days. However, I have realized that the performance I have had in the past (and have now) is nowhere near what it should be for a system with my specs. I have heard numerous people with lesser specs being able to play F.E.A.R. Combat at max settings without a hiccup, I could never do that. I have also been playing BF:V lately and I have been experiencing random FPS drops here and there. I tried disabling all external programs and nothing helped. I mostly play a Half-Life 1 mod called Natural Selection and my FPS ranges from 99 to around 10. The game is over 4 years old, I don't understand how that is possible. I have my system cleaned from unecessary startup applications and everything. Finally, I have ran 3dMark05 and I get a score of about 8500, which is on-par with most others out there.

Now, I have tried overclocking using ATITools and all I get is a performance drop. I set my 3D Perf. clocks to 520/750 and my 3dMark05 score went down to about 7600. What gives?

Do you guys recommend I flash my card to 7900GTX? Would that help with gaming at all? If so, which one should I go for considering my RAM (optimized or not optimized)? Also, do I need to reinstall the 101.41 M6 drivers if I flash my card?

Please help me get my gaming performance to what it should be! It's driving me nuts!
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post #2 of 8
4/5/07 at 12:00pm
This is more than likely a Hardware issue. Did you notice odd temperature bursts when you get the sudden FPS dip? Another thing you can try is using a different set of drivers I use the Nvdia 101.41 Drivers with laptopvideo2go's INF file which has been working great on my vista system.
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post #3 of 8
4/5/07 at 3:20pm
When was the last time you cleaned out the heatsink grilles in the back of the unit? Like Machina said, it sounds more like a temperature issue more than anything else... I have to clean my fans and heatsink out every two weeks or so to get rid of the dust bunnies or my system will overheat also. Run I8KFanGUI in the background and find out what the peak temps are while gaming. Since you have been having this go on for so long, I can only correlate with it being hardware related, as you have since reinstalled with Vista.

As far as flashing your graphics card rom, I have had mine flashed for a very long time now, with zero negative effects thus far. As long as you are only overclocking the 3D settings, the long term impact of overclocking isn't that bad. Since you have a 2500 though, you may have greater gaming gains by flashing to the GTX bios - just because of driver support. I know the latest Nvidia beta's work on all of the GeForce series, but from what I have been witnessing people with the pro level cards aren't gaming as well with them... Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I would try the GTX flash with stock speeds and see if you have any improvement in the games you play. If you do, then its just down to the driver not playing well with a Quadro.

In any case, let me know what you find out. A lot of people so far have gained several hundred 3DMark points by using the TweaksRUs modded 101.46's over the LV2G set, so you should be good to go there - though trying a different driver never hurts when troubleshooting. Good luck!
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post #4 of 8
4/5/07 at 11:45pm
I agree with machina and krayziepop; I had some fps drops while playing in XP and it is due to heat issues, when running 3dmark, temperature doesn't rise enough to slow down the card.
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post #5 of 8
4/6/07 at 5:46pm
I spent a couple months trying to get XP performance out of Vista but the Nvidia drivers are just not there yet. 100.59 have been the most stable for me (7950) and properly handles 2 external monitors.
Unable to successfully OC with any drivers 100.x and above. The 9x. drivers were so bad even OC'ing did not bring it up to the stock speeds that I get on the 100.x drivers.
My solution was to setup a dual-boot and use XP for all my gaming. Because XP and Vista are both NTFS, you only need a small partition to install the XP OS. All games can be stored on the Vista partition (I created an XP-Games folder). It ends up being easier because with Vista I closed everything in my tray and stopped services before gaming. Now I just reboot into XP and yahoooo.... everything works (including all the features of the X-Fi card .

When running FEAR on Vista, I had to turn off Shadowing to make the FPS drops go away. I would start getting slowdowns after about 15 minutes of play. Really sounded like a heat issue but I was not even breaking 86c at that time. That was with the 8 degree offset entered in i8kfangui.
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post #6 of 8
4/7/07 at 4:17pm
PSYCHO, try using the 101.41 Mobileforce drivers under Vista and use ATITool to overclock (.27 beta release works under vista when run as administrator) Vista runs games the same (if not better than) as XP does for me now. Its nice running Oblivion maxxed out under Vista finally.
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post #7 of 8
4/9/07 at 12:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Krayziepop
PSYCHO, try using the 101.41 Mobileforce drivers under Vista and use ATITool to overclock (.27 beta release works under vista when run as administrator) Vista runs games the same (if not better than) as XP does for me now. Its nice running Oblivion maxxed out under Vista finally.
I had some weird issues with 101.41 and went back to 100.59. I had problems with dual external monitors... not keeping display settings (Dualview & resolution settings) and it would kick back error messages when monitors come back on (I have them shut off at 20 minutes). I still had 'first person shooter' gaming issues even with 101.41 but I was not overclocking. I did not have to overclock to get FEAR and HL2:E1 to run properly in XP. I'm going to try again when the next level of drivers comes out and I have a larger hard drive (waiting on the 160gig 7.2k). Creative does not support DirectSound-based EAX games in Vista so it was another reason for sticking with XP. Finished FEAR:EP and now playing R6:Vegas, Prey & Stalker... all happily running on my XP partition.
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post #8 of 8
4/9/07 at 1:20pm
Thread Starter 
I am currently running LV2Go's 101.70 drivers and have some pretty good performance with them. I gained about 200 pts on 3dMark05 and my games are running pretty smooth. Haven't tried BF:V yet though as I can't find my CD, but seems like people are happy with it.

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/
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