Benchmark results for NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (Covert)

[Guest Morph]

Hello i got a mirax gx 7000 ( MSI, geforce 86000m gt (acer)

i installed the driver 176.37.. ok all good on games etc.. but in a specified game it sucks.. the game is Tibia

the graphics are light and i dont know why the fps got down every time i walk 1 square..

any suggestion of another drive?

[Twisteds7]

Covert,

Thank you for all of your hard work, it is greatly appreciated by everyone on and off of these forums. If there was a beer emoticon on here I would use it for you!

[Twisteds7]

From memory of a test I did this morning using DOX's 180.44, 1280x1024, 3dmark06, and no overclock I got

3dmark06: 4316

SM2/HDR: 3344

[Covert]

Sorry it took 1 extra day to get the scores up, I've got loads to do now so I won't be benching any more requests, but as newer drivers with higher version numbers comes out I will bench those and I don't mind you reminding me of new drivers.

And your eyes are not deceiving you on DOX's 180.44 with Crysis, I watched the frames fly with motion blur and fluffy clouds. The Lost Coast scores are 10 frames higher because I am now running it in 32-bit mode rather than 64-bit mode, the CSS scores are lower for the most recent set of benches for who knows what reason, but it's not noticeable in games since the refresh rate on almost everyone's monitors is 60hz. DOX's 3DMark scores aren't up in the charts this time but texture's do look noticeably sharper from a distance and there is almost no noticeable stuttering in counter-strike source.

well, there you go guys :)

[Mushu]

I understand you've got a lot on your hand. :) But thanks for testing out Dox's 180.44. By the way, what do you use to make the charts? :)

Edited November 18, 2008 by Shaythong

[Covert]

I understand you've got a lot on your hand. :) But thanks for testing out Dox's 180.44. By the way, what do you use to make the charts? :)

Microsoft Office Excel 2008 :P using loads of stuff to do the driver sorting, conditional bars etc. then I use the snipping tool to make a jpeg from it, upload them to photobucket and paste the links here. I don't know what I'm going to do when the results are larger than my screen... I can only make the font so small. If anyone could suggest a nicer way to put my results up it would be greatly appreciated, I won't do solid text results because they don't look very nice and you can't sort the results

Edit: Well I looked around and found some sites like ipaper, box, and zoho sheet, and they let me see my results online but my files lose all formatting and there's no way I can find of representing the data on this forum. But if you don't mind clicking a link to a page with all my results in very ordinary charts I'll give it a go.

Edited November 18, 2008 by Covert

[Mushu]

I would suggest making a chart for every two months (or when the items go up to some point) then link the last few images to a website which shows the image there so the post doesn't get too crowded. I can host them on my website somewhere if you'd like, but I'm not sure. :) Microsoft Office Excel 2008? Couldn't have guessed. :)

Edited November 19, 2008 by Shaythong

[Covert]

I would suggest making a chart for every two months (or when the items go up to some point) then link the last few images to a website which shows the image there so the post doesn't get too crowded. I can host them on my website somewhere if you'd like, but I'm not sure. :) Microsoft Office Excel 2008? Couldn't have guessed. :)

hahaha, well I took a bunch of extremely boring MS Office classes and there's loads of stuff you can do in excel.

I actually found some software that can convert excel files into jpegs so I won't have to do any more snips and I will always get all of the results. Problem solved!

[Mushu]

Yay! No more wasting time snipping images of the excel files. Microsoft should have put a "Save as JPG" option into that earlier!

[Dox]

hello covert,

would you say you prefer the slight texture sharpness and smoother gameplay vs higher fps (maybe stuttery)?

I know those things effects 3d marks (sharper textures especially), realworld games can be faster than what was benched but its limited due to what I said.

However I do feel i got the balance about right looking at the numbers.....

perf vs image quality is ag old enimies :)

[Guest Amanda J]

Thanks for benching 169.09! Guess I should finally change then, which would you recommend? DOX 178.13 seems to be the best out of them :)

[Twisteds7]

"hahaha, well I took a bunch of extremely boring MS Office classes and there's loads of stuff you can do in excel."

Ooooh yeah! I love Excel now that I've learned a lot of the little tricks and functions it has. It does fall short when it comes to statistic tools though. :)

[Covert]

hello covert,

would you say you prefer the slight texture sharpness and smoother gameplay vs higher fps (maybe stuttery)?

I know those things effects 3d marks (sharper textures especially), realworld games can be faster than what was benched but its limited due to what I said.

However I do feel i got the balance about right looking at the numbers.....

perf vs image quality is ag old enimies :)

To be honest I don't care if nvidia makes my picture quality look 25% worse so long as performance increases substantially. So long as my graphics settings in my games are configured high I will feel as if the graphics are better than they really are :)

DOX's texture sharpening modification messes up the filtering and some textures end up looking a bit too grainy to be honest.

erm, to the guy who asked me to bench the 169 driver, yes upgrade. Go with one of the latest drivers like 180.44, games with very high framerates get lower framerates but stutter less, and visually look more smooth. While games with lower framerates increase in performance. Evens things out, don't go directly by the 3DMark scores, DOX's 180.44 gets amazing results in Crysis.

[Guest Guest]

*Hint hint* try installing TinyXP BASE (OS), i9Kfan (Cooling), defrag (Maintenance), overclock (Speed), and then clean up your startup and I guarantee 2000 points more in 3D Mark 06 :)

DOes TinyXP actually support games? or even SLI? i heard it doesnt work with laptops

[Mushu]

Just reminding you to try out 180.48 when you have free time. :)

[Covert]

DOes TinyXP actually support games? or even SLI? i heard it doesnt work with laptops

TinyXP plays all games. If some drivers or something is missing then just download them online

Just reminding you to try out 180.48 when you have free time. :)

I'm on it

[Guest Guest]

Hi covert

in dox 180.44, how to configure Advanced 3D setting in Nvidia control panel to get maximum performance, no matter with the image quality, i only want games perform faster and high frame rates

[Stanislav_Kukov]

Hello Covert, must admit the admiration towards your conquest :-)

I have the Toshiba Satellite X205-SLi6 (T9300, 400 HDD, 2x8600M GT 512MB (1024 VRAM), 3GB RAM) and i was trying out certain drivers and they all have very strange issues (such as: clipping in Crysis, cutting

the picture in GRID, etc.).

Tried out online update and i got 176.26 which does pretty well but i am almost sure it does not give the good results like others I've tried but at least no issues in gaming.

Do u recommend switching to some other and what shall they be?

Thanks in advance and wish you all the best with your studies. (what do u study btw?) I'm a MBA student in the University of Malta :-)

Cheers mate!

[Mushu]

TinyXP? Not sure about it though. I haven't tried it, but it sounds cool. I should try TinyVista for this laptop. I wonder if it affects the 7150M performance on Vista in any way. But the other laptop I'm helping with works great with Vista. Probably still slow, but it's worth a try. In the meantime, I just looked at Excel myself, and it took a while to get used to, but you're charts are amazing. Great job! :)

Edited November 20, 2008 by Shaythong

[Guest Guest]

with oc :)

[jokkos]

Hello, advise please. What newer driver, the best for my card 8600M GT? While the most suitable 169.02, with it problems are not present. Installed other, newer versions, last tried 180.43, there are glitches, conflicts. Without usage of the additional programs, what driver is better??? Excuse for broken English I Thank.

Edited November 20, 2008 by jokkos

[Covert]

Hi covert

in dox 180.44, how to configure Advanced 3D setting in Nvidia control panel to get maximum performance, no matter with the image quality, i only want games perform faster and high frame rates

Right click on the desktop, click nvidia control panel. Go to global settings and set "negative LOD bias" to clamp, set texture filtering to high performance, and use texture optimization, force off anything else you don't need. advanced settings can be found in the INF files of drivers and in and around the drivers themselves, you'll have too explore it like DOX has been doing.

Hello Covert, must admit the admiration towards your conquest :-)

I have the Toshiba Satellite X205-SLi6 (T9300, 400 HDD, 2x8600M GT 512MB (1024 VRAM), 3GB RAM) and i was trying out certain drivers and they all have very strange issues (such as: clipping in Crysis, cutting

the picture in GRID, etc.).

Tried out online update and i got 176.26 which does pretty well but i am almost sure it does not give the good results like others I've tried but at least no issues in gaming.

Do u recommend switching to some other and what shall they be?

Thanks in advance and wish you all the best with your studies. (what do u study btw?) I'm a MBA student in the University of Malta :-)

Cheers mate!

thanks :) I'd recommended reading the first page again :) I study many things

Hello, advise please. What newer driver, the best for my card 8600M GT? While the most suitable 169.02, with it problems are not present. Installed other, newer versions, last tried 180.43, there are glitches, conflicts. Without usage of the additional programs, what driver is better??? Excuse for broken English I Thank.

Try 180.47. I do not have all the answers because everyone has a different opinion of which ones are best. I personally don't care about small glitches so long as they don't break the game, and I'm mainly focused on finding high-performance drivers, which is why I made this thread in the first place! as before I suggest you read the first page again :P and when in doubt, don't be scared to test a few drivers out for yourself!

[Guest The Exile]

Thanks for the great job, i have been using DOX 178.24 drivers for a while using RivaTuner for overclocking

So far ive been overclocking my 8600M GT 256MB DDR2 card from 475/400 to 575/450, when overclocking i always force the fan to 100% (Using I8kFan)

My temp even when playing for an hour doesnt go higher than 62c, but when i try to overclock a bit higher the memory clock i get weird game glitches (I guess thats because its an DDR2) and the core clock i can push it up to 600, but sometimes tha games act a bit weird,

The weird thing is that, my card temp never reaches 70c or 80c because i force the fan to 100%, so i was wondering if changing the drivers would give better overclocking results?

Also sometimes the card downclocks itself, and i have to restart the laptop to overclock again, could that be because of the drivers too?

Then again the card temp never goes very hot (62-64c temp max)

Thanks for the help =D

Running Windows Vista SP1 32B

[Guest Guest]

Right click on the desktop, click nvidia control panel. Go to global settings and set "negative LOD bias" to clamp, set texture filtering to high performance, and use texture optimization, force off anything else you don't need. advanced settings can be found in the INF files of drivers and in and around the drivers themselves, you'll have too explore it like DOX has been doing.

OK Covert, i already configured it, but

How to configure this item below, to get max. performance:

1. Conformant texture clamp (use hardware / use Open GL / off)

2. Force mipmaps (none / bilinear / trilinear)

3. Maximum pre-rendered frames (0/1/2/3/.....)

4. Threaded optimization (auto/on/off)

My system, core 2 duo T7500 2,2 GHz, NVIDIA 8600M GT 512 VRAM,

[Covert]

Right click on the desktop, click nvidia control panel. Go to global settings and set "negative LOD bias" to clamp, set texture filtering to high performance, and use texture optimization, force off anything else you don't need. advanced settings can be found in the INF files of drivers and in and around the drivers themselves, you'll have too explore it like DOX has been doing.

OK Covert, i already configured it, but

How to configure this item below, to get max. performance:

1. Conformant texture clamp (use hardware / use Open GL / off)

2. Force mipmaps (none / bilinear / trilinear)

3. Maximum pre-rendered frames (0/1/2/3/.....)

4. Threaded optimization (auto/on/off)

My system, core 2 duo T7500 2,2 GHz, NVIDIA 8600M GT 512 VRAM,

I haven't experimented that much, but I think it would be:

1. use hardware

2. none

3. 3 (use 1 or even 0 if you find it is too unresponsive)

4. auto