Nvidia GPU driver level

[kladner]

I just went through another 2-3 hour attempt to get newer nVidia drivers and a newer system BIOS to work without the heavy hardware interrupt burden described in the previous post. I still don't know what's going on, nor do I know for sure how I got it working again (with the older BIOS and nVidia 285.62.)

First off, I grant that I was not totally scientific about it in the end. I was trying to make one change at a time and evaluate. However, Win7 insists on installing drivers by hook or crook, including eight instances of the nVidia HD Audio Driver. These are in addition to the Realtek HD Audio Driver. It took many attempts at uninstalling, cleaning up, and reinstalling.

When I once again gave up and tried to restore the 285.62 with the newer, and then the older BIOS, I kept getting the high interrupt traffic.

Here's the part which leaves me in doubt. I only got the older setup running right after uninstalling twice (Windows put back an nVidia driver), deleting the nVidia folder in Program Files, running the registry cleaner, and doing the install in Safe Mode. Unfortunately, I had not gone this full route on the earlier attempts with the new drivers with the newer BIOS, so I don't know if it would have worked.

In any case, I do suggest to my fellow Windows users that they check for this condition using the Process Explorer linked in the previous post. At stock settings it drops my Average Rate from over 100 (each on 4 instances of mfaktc on a GTX 570) to ~80-85.

If this suggests anything specific to anyone reading this I'd appreciate any hints you might have. I'll probably try again with the whole process described above after I get over "reboot burnout". Then maybe I'll get a better idea of whether it is an install problem, or buggy software/firmware.