7950GTX Driver Fix

As more and more 7950 users were complaining of Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) installs on drivers I began to look into the issue personally. I was able to track down its cause to the ever popular coolbits. Apparently, for us 7950GTX users, this registry entry is not so cool. I will give three strategies for repairing this problem. Note that both pre-install and post-install refer to the driver installation. Caution: All three of these methods will prevent you from being able to use the Nvidia Control Panel to overclock. Note: This is not a big issue since the control panel interface for coolbits isn't all that great anyway. Just use ATITool, NTune, or RivaTuner to overclock your card if you wish. Pre-Install BSOD FIX INF Modification If you are using a LV2G driver then this is the quickest method. Open up the driver INF and remove the coolbits line. It most likely looks like this: So just search for "cool" within the INF and delete the whole line. Proceed with the installation. You should be good to go. Post-Install BSOD FIX You may be forced to use one of these methods if your driver set does not allow access to the INF. Registry Overwriting I will post an explanation later but all you need to do is download this file Most likely you will have to install it in safe mode (F5 on startup) Once you install it, reboot. Your problems should cease. Registry Deletion Start -> Run -> Regedit Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\NVIDIA Corporation\\Global\\NVTweak and remove the coolbits entry You should be good to go. NOTE: Newer mobile drivers should not have BSOD problems because the coolbits entry has been removed from the modified INF.

In Progress:

Here is a bit of background into all issues fixed in the first post:

BSOD Background
The drivers seem to BSOD with any coolbits value that turn coolbits on. You see there are 2^32 possible values but we can only choose half of those because one bit has to be logic low. The quickest fix is to mask the coolbits on registry entry with one that turns coolbits off. There are better fixes, however, such as removing the entry as a whole.




Desktop Corruption Background
I would explain the Desktop Corruption issue myself but Pieter has already done an excellent job:


Recommendations
For the coolbits entry, rather than masking the entry to turn it off, just delete the entry.
For desktop corruption, flash the bios with a higher memory clock so that you will be fine no matter what software/operating system you are using (provided you have nvidia drivers).

If you want to join up in driver tweaks you can check out this thread, LV2G community, or our own NBF MobileForce community.

Special Thanks to Pieter and GFT for they are the voices that speak to the masses.

Also want to thank Debaucher for his persistence. (I havent forgotten about those roms haha. I see you are into the swirl so I will get the results to you ASAP).

I'm not anal about my posts. You can link any of my threads/posts.

Thanks Achilles.

And if its not too much trouble Turbo, try this method on another driver set. If you cannot OC on them either then I will look into it.

Pieter, I was waiting to post the background information since I was tired. I did a little testing and I found that any value with the second least significant bit (binary) being logic high would result in failure. These must also be the values for which coolbits is in the control panel because I don't see any overclocking features with these values.

Invalid last values (hex): 2,3,6,7,A,B,E,F

Tested about 15-20 values.

Edit: And I am unsure as to the percentage of 7950GTX users this affects. In fact, I'm unsure that I am even affected. I have simply recreated a similar issue on my machine to diagnose this.

Alrite. Just one more thing. This doesn't have to be done anytime soon since I will not be back for about a week. Try a 90 series driver. I have a feeling it will work fine meaning I will have to look into the newer 100.xx drivers or at least 16x series.