gHacks technology news » nvidia drivers http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 NVIDIA System Tools http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/05/nvidia-system-tools/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/05/nvidia-system-tools/#comments Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:16:13 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=6773 NVIDIA video card owners should definitely take a look at the NVIDIA System Tools suite which can be downloaded from NVIDIA. It is a set of system tools that have to be installed next to the video card drivers. The suite consists of three different tools which are installed separately during installation: NVIDIA Performance Group, NVIDIA System Monitor and NVIDIA System Update. There is unfortunately no way to pick the tools to install, all three will be installed together on the system.

The interesting question for NVIDIA video card owners is obviously about the new features that those system tools offer after installation. It does add two new entries to the NVIDIA Control Panel that can be used to tweak various graphic card settings. The NVIDIA System Tools add a Performance and Update entry to the Control Panel.

The Updates entry can be used to check for video card driver updates and schedule these checks to be performed regularly. The Performance tab adds an option to create usage profiles that use specific clock and fan speeds and voltages. Those profiles can then be loaded automatically by defining rules in the Profile Policies menu.

A user could for instance create the rule to load the profile high-speed which is using an overclocked video card and full fan speeds whenever the game Crysis is loaded on the system.

nvidia control panel

Besides switching profiles three other actions can be specified when certain conditions are reached: Signal a warning tone, pop-up a warning message and to launch an application. Conditions include temperature reaching certain levels, loading of applications or when a certain time is reached.

The NVIDIA System Monitor is the last tool of the NVIDIA System Tools suite. It brings up a few widgets on the screen that display cpu and memory usage of the system by default but can also include information about the video card and bios.

The downside of the NVIDIA System Tools suite is that it uses lots of computer memory and is therefor only advisable to be used on systems with enough computer memory.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/05/nvidia-system-tools/feed/ 1 Install the latest Nvidia Drivers on your Notebook http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/09/install-the-latest-nvidia-drivers-on-your-notebook/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/09/install-the-latest-nvidia-drivers-on-your-notebook/#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:37:43 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5215 Graphic card drivers for notebooks are usually not updated that often by the manufacturer of the Notebook. Nvidia on the other hand does not provide access to many graphic card drivers for Notebook graphic cards on their website and the desktop graphic cards cannot be installed on notebooks.

The guys from Laptop Video 2 Go have come up with a solution to this problem. They provide an inf generator and driver downloads so that most notebook users can updated their notebook’s graphic card by downloading those files from the website. The modded inf files not only work with most notebook graphic cards but do provide access to several hidden features as well that fix issues and add tweaks to the drivers.

Basically the user selects a driver that he wants to install, downloads the modded inf file from the website, replaces the inf from the driver package with the modded one and starts the installation of the driver.

I suggest you read the FAQ on the site which explains the process in detail and provides links to the pages that are needed to download the files.

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