GeForce 7600

[FlyinBullets 0]

Hi, I have a 7600 GS, and was wondering which driver would be best for running arma. Any suggestions?

[-Puma- 2]

well u could try the latest

[Mr_Tea 0]

Look here, @ the Nvidia driver page.

[FlyinBullets 0]

Alright, thanks, I already have the latest from Nvidia, but I have seen some drivers that aren't made by Nvidia, such as some beta drivers, and was wondering if any of those were better.

[tool831 0]

I have the same graphic card, my advise is just stay with the official ones

[ck-claw 1]

Sorry for sort of hi-jack? Just thought it'd be better than starting another thread!

How about for the 7900GS?

Have used various beta/running on stock drivers now!

Didnt know if anyone had found some excellent ones?

[Robgunnatkin 0]

Go 7900GTX 512 (500/600)

ExtremeG Mobile Force 94.20 work great for mobile nVidia 7xxx seriers cards running under XP.

They also have tweaked versions for desktop cards.

Vista users should get the latest 16x.xx version drivers.

[Balschoiw 0]

I´m using a Leadtek A 7600 GT AGP 256 MB and tested several drivers, Omega drivers, XTreme-G 162.18, latest official Nvidia drivers, etc.

The Omega drivers gave me gfx errors, the XTreme-G drivers gave me weird lines that appeared from time to time, the latest official Nvidia drivers didn´t give me good performance while loosing the classic gfx panel and some options like overclocking.

I ended up with the official Leadtek driver release for the 7600 GT

that gives me best performance in combination with coolbits to reactivate the hidden driver features like overclocking and running rivatuner once to get the environment setup right, like enabling features for the chipset and so on.

I also stripped the card, removed it´s fan and cooler, replaced the heatpads with arctic silver heatpaste (?) assembled the card again and am now able to run it at 612Mhz core and 1568Mhz for the memory at temperatures of 54° celsius for the GPU. There still seems to be potential but I don´t have time right now to tweak it more. By adding a slow-turning 120mm fan to the side of the case I made sure that there is always fresh air for RAM and the general temperature in the case dropped by around 15° Celsius. Depending on the temperature outside (my computer room is under the roof = hot when it´s sunny) I get temperatures of about 22° Celsius to 30° Ceslius in the case under heavy load. The temperature node is placed at the RAM modules. Adding another 80mm fan to the back of the case created a stream of air over the gfx-card and therefore temperatures are very good on it. Especially the RAM modules seem to benefit alot from constant airflow. The 120mm fan and the 80mm fan are wired together and I use a 400kOhm, 30 watt wire resistor I have also embedded in the side of the case to

be able to change the speed of the fans by regulating the voltage from 7-12 V. I usually run them around 9 V. They are very silent at that voltage while providing great airflow.

I have found that most of the performance problems I had where related to heat. Get the heat away, optimize the card by adding good heatpaste and you can go much higher with oc-settings than before. I maybe will add some copper coolers to the RAM on the Gfx card and maybe will replace the great stock fan with a better one, but for now I haven´t reached the oc limit, so I will test to see what I can get of it without replacing the fan.

I´d definately check the manufaturers pages and try to get the latest driver from their page. Leadtek for example does customize the drivers as it seems. And they run great for me, even if there releasedate was in April. Performance and stability are great with them. With modded drivers I only get problems.

[Mr_Tea 0]

Hehe, my card is build for operating without an fan, cooled with an heatpipe.

Imagine what happened when i put an fan on the cooler.

The card now rarely reaches 60°C, stays ~55°C most of the time, at an room temperature of 25°C, up to 30°C on hot days.

I have all my rooms under the roof, and it can get very hot in here.

[FlyinBullets 0]

My 7600 doesn't even has a fan, just has the black heat sink, which is all I can put in. Anything bigger wouldn't fit into my case. (I have a sony VAIO case that is fairly small) Because basically all my comp is, is an updated VAIO.

[Infam0us 10]

Try here ....

Tweaks R Us GFX Drivers

These are tweaked versions of the Nvidia drivers, plus they have their own forum if you need any advice

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]Hehe, my card is build for operating without an fan, cooled with an heatpipe.

Imagine what happened when i put an fan on the cooler.

Nothing ?

Apart from properly cooling the GPU it seems to me that RAM cooling is one of the things you really have to do when trying to get the most performance form your gfx-card. Ventilation is an issue here, as the best copper sinks do little if the air doesn´t flow over them.

Replacing the cheap and therefore often used heatpads on the GPU did a good job for me. It costs no money (if you have some heat-lube lying around) and decreases temperature of GPU for about 5° Celsius, which is quite much if you want to overclock your GPU)

Quote[/b] ]My 7600 doesn't even has a fan, just has the black heat sink, which is all I can put in. Anything bigger wouldn't fit into my case.

I´m prety sure you can attach at least a 40mm fan to the side of your card, blowing over the heatsink to transport the hot air away.

As I said, heat in my system was a big showstopper, be it RAM-wise or Gfx card wise. Arma brings components to high heat emission and this causes a lot of freezes if the heat isn´t transported outside the case. I had some freezes before I improved the cooling in my case. Now I have a stable and highly overclocked system running stable.

Still, the limit is not reached yet. There are voltmods for the 7600 cards that do raise the locked voltage to gain access to higher ram-rates and GPU circles. As it´s a bit tricky to do the mod I haven´t tried yet and I will only do it if I got a different cooler as there are limits with the stock coolers on this mod and I certainly do not want to fry my card.

[Mr_Tea 0]

Nothing ?

...

If you`d call an temperature drop of ~15°C nothing.

Heatpipe plus fan is very cool, in the true meaning of "cool".

[Balschoiw 0]

I thought of "nothing" in the the sense of "oh my gfx card will explode"

It´s what I´m saying. The best coolers do only get the heat away from the GPU. The user has to make sure that the hot air is taken away from the card and transported outside the case and fresh air is always brought into the case and over the components like RAM and GPU cooler and CPU cooler. It really does help.

[Mr_Tea 0]

I have an Chieftec bigtower, with all cooling options used.

There is no hot air, that could stay in my tower.

[jantenner 0]

got the forceware 91.74 and it runs arma good without crashes or gfx errors. runs good with other games too. no problems.