Question for Nvidia 9600 GT users

Hello everyone. I am slowly recovering and reloading software after a nasty series of bluescreen crashes, corrupted system files, etc etc which caused me to wipe second life completely, and do a repair installation of XP, and upgrade to the latest BIOS version available. The system appears to be stable now, but I have not reinstalled SL yet. I am at a point where I want to determine the best graphics card driver to use when I reinstall SL. Version 175.16 is the currently installed driver, but the current plan is to install version 175.19 after first cleaning with Driver Cleaner, as Chosen Few has recommended. Thanks for the great description, Chosen!

Since I don't have SL reloaded on that computer yet, I can't copy the full details of my system, except to say it is a MSI P45 Neo-F motherboard with a E8400 Core 2 Duo cpu, with 2 sticks of Crucial Ballistix 8500 series memory totalling 2 gigs, and a 750W Cooler Master PS, running XP Pro, SP3 with a wired ethernet connection to a D-Link router. Graphics card is BFG 9600 GT. SL ran beautifully for a few weeks on this system until the blue screens began.

My question is posed to the people who are using the 9600 card in SL. Which drivers are performing best for you overall, and also specifically in SL? I'm a little concerned that 175.19 might be too early for the 9600 and thus may not contain possible crucial bugfixes.

Thanks in advance. Any input would be appreciated.

jem Dumpling

bumping once before giving up

Nothing to worry really, the 9600/9800 cards are supported in 175.19. Besides that they are only relabeled 8800 cards using the same G92/G94 chipset.

Go for 175.19 for now, hopefully issues with palletized textures will be fixed when 1.22 goes gold.

Sorry if I didn't make it clrear in whichever post of mine you previously read, but 175.16 is as SL-friendly as 175.19. Which one to use depends on which card you have. For example, I have a pair of 8700's in my laptop. I use 175.16 on that machine, only because I wasn't able to find a 175.19 version that listed the 8700 specifically as supported. Mobile drivers can be a little funky that way.

On my desktiop, which has 8800's in it, I use 175.19.

They both work great.

I'm running the 178.13 drivers for my 9600 and haven't had any problems. I am mainly running the RC so palletized textures are gone, which might account for the lack of problems, but I haven't seen any issues on the odd occassion I've used the main 1.21 viewer.

Thank you for the replies! I know I'm being a bit anal about the driver versions, but I'm trying to touch as many bases a possible in an effort to prevent any more blue screen errors. Since ALL of the components in my system are brand new, and my error messages were so varied, pretty much all devices are suspect, and I'm trying to eliminate anything I possibly can from the suspect list. I was concerned that maybe there might be a bug in an older video driver that was only triggered when running a specific SL viewer with my specific system BIOS. The only constant I have to work with is that SL was running whenever I had a blue screen crash, and without SL installed, things seem to be working fine so far. And BTW. I've done multiple clean reinstallations of SL as well, and I don't think overheating was an issue.

I just loaded 175.19 after first using Driver Cleaner. Looks good so far. I haven't reloaded SL yet, because I know that it puts a strain on a lot of different system areas. I'm trying to stress the system as much as I can before I load it, and f I don't see any problems, I'll install SL and see what happens. If I have any more blue screens after reloading SL, I'll start working my way up through later drivers, and if that doesn't help, I'll be reporting back to you on how much distance I got when I dropkicked the computer out the front door.

Thanks again for the helpful input!

jem Dumpling