nVidia drivers for notebooks

[douglasrac]

Hi,

Several topics here stat that nVidia always recommend to keep your drivers up to date.
I got into the nVidia live chat support and here is what they told me:

1) For notebooks, it is recommendable to keep the drivers that came with the notebook. The latest drivers may try to get the 100% performance from the graphic card and that may cause over heat.
So, nVidia do not always recommend to keep the latest drivers. And we've seeing that for CiM, some problems can be solved by lowering driver version.

And out of curiosity, other things I discover:

2) The idle temperature of the card should be around 35 to 45 celsius and if any graphic intensive games are running, it is acceptable to go up to 85 Celsius. The temperature should not go below 15C.
This is for Desktop.
Impressively mine goes to 100C and I always thought was ok. Since its brand new and since the beginning it reaches this temp.

And how to monitor the temperature? There are several programs to do that. But measure temperature is not as easy as it sounds. It is complicated and depending on the method used, it can vary as much as 10C. Might be the worth testing some.

nVidia oficial temperature measure tool: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-system-tools-6.08-driver.html

The factory of your nVidia card (MSI, EVGA) also have their own tools.

 

[Drag0nflamez]

I use HWMonitor for monitoring. I don't own an NVIDIA but this seems odd. At AMD it's the opposite; the old driver versions that your manufacturer never, ever, ever, ever ever ever ever updates are crap, new ones work alright (I'm currently on 12.2)

 

[douglasrac]

I don't know how AMD works, but nVidia drivers update mainly do 2 things:

- Improve performance in specific games (5% improvement at StarCraft; 13% improvement in Battlefield 3, etc.) You can see in the change log.
- Bug fixes

The problem here are those performance improvement, that is making the hardware works harder somehow. And for notebook performance is secondary. Mobility, size and cooling system comes first.

I can assure you my GPU temp dropped from 76C to 54C by only lowering driver version.
Sure if you have a desktop it doesn't matter. Better performance is your priority.
But higher temperature doesn't mean the driver is making something bad. Just means nVidia is trying to get more performance each new version. Temperature is secondary (but not for notebook users - the whole system is compromised, different than a desktop).