nVidia:gpu's = Jason:campers

[213]

Well I'm stuck at an empass.

Just recovered my system from yet another BSOD, reboot cycle nightmare. formatted HD and all that.

Now I know most of you guys here have newer hardware and OS's, but I'm wondering if anyone might know:

What the heck are best, most stable drivers for my dated 8800GT while running win XP PS3, .net frameworking, (all the stuff microsoft throws at you when auto updates is on.)

I'm so going with an ATI/AMD combo with my next pc, which hopefully will be in the next few months or so, but in the meantime, please help if anyone knows which drivers of nVidia's actually work reasonably well.

evga 8800GT 512MB
Win XP SP3

thanks in advance peeps.

 

[NRG]

I don't have any trouble from the latest 196 drivers with my 8800GT, but I'm also on Windows 7.

A lot of people like the 182 and 186 drivers for the 8800's and such. They even work good on Windows 7 apparently.

 

[SkaarjMaster]

I'm using the 182.06 drivers with my GTX280 and XP SP2, but my newest installed game is UT3.

 

[213]

thanks for narrowing it down guys. Think I'm gonna try the 186, I seem to remember them being pretty reliable.

I've heard nothing but bad things about the 196.xx drivers. They killed off support for RivaTuner (molten gpu anyone?) and messed up ppl's ability to oc at all I think. I've got a friend of mine here who upgraded to them and he's livid. He's probably going to be baking his GPU tonight when he gets home from work in the hopes that it was just the "microfracturing" problem he got hit with and not a full blown overheated/fried chip.

...now I want potato chips.

 

[SkaarjMaster]

That's why I don't volunteer to be a driver guinea pig and I hardly ever upgrade anyway. Just search forums for driver problems and stay away from bad ones.

 

[NRG]

I've heard nothing but bad things about the 196.xx drivers. They killed off support for RivaTuner (molten gpu anyone?) and messed up ppl's ability to oc at all I think.

196.21 does have a bug preventing overclocking, but the 196.34 beta is the same driver with the overclock bug fixed. It'll be included in the next official driver. For me, 196 seems to be the best. I would lose SLI support for multiple games I play regularly if I rolled back to 18x.xx

Every time Nvidia gives out new drivers, Rivatuner is always "broken". (just disables some features really) The program needs to be updated with every driver release. Otherwise, you can still overclock with Rivatuner and do most of the tasks.