official nvidia 186.82 strange behaviour?

[tsunami2265]

Hi guys & gals, just day before yesterday i installed the official 186.82 drivers from microsoft. Now after I installed the drivers I noticed strange fps issues. I own two games, Empire total war and AA3. I dont know why I was experiencing ridiculously low fps in Empire, I had to reduce some details which I never had to do so earlier. But the other extreme was that I got unbelievable fps increase in AA3. In some areas where I used to get something like 25-30 fps now i was getting more than 30, literally. I read somewhere that powermizer doesnt seem to work properly with the latest drivers. And because I play empire more, i reverted back to Dox 185.85. So now I get good fps in Empire but lower in AA3. I checked powermizer, the settings were alright but it seems it lowers the clock in some games when I use 186.82.

I couldnt do proper benchmarking cos I dont have 3dmark 06. Perhaps u ppl can tell me if 186.82 is really better off than dox 185.85 or should I wait for 191.xx? Or any suggestions if powermizer can be fixed.

I have dell xps1340 with 256mb 9500M DDR3.