XPS2 6800 Go Ultra Performance Issue

vindication · May 3, 2006, 12:53 PM

Hi everyone,

This is my first post, and I'm not very tech savvy so I apologize if I don't make any sense.

Anyway, I'm coming to my wits end with an issue I have been having with my video card recently.

Before I get into it, here is my system:

Dell XPS Gen 2 Laptop
nVidia 6800 Go Ultra
2 Gigs of RAM
7200 RPM, 60 GB HD
2.26 GHz Intel Pentium M Processor

About a month or two ago, after having had the computer for about 4 months, I realized that I was due for a video driver update. So, I searched around and found The Extreme-G MobileForce Drivers and downloaded one of them (the latest one at the time, unfortunately I don't remember which one this one) and experienced an incredible boost in performance in the game I most often play, World of Warcraft.

I was able to finally completely max the games graphics settings and simultaneously experienced an increased framerate that averaged around 60-70 fps. I finally felt like I was getting my money's worth out of the machine. Everything ran silky smooth for about a month, when for no reason at all my game began to see incredible drops in the framerate in outdoor areas and heavily populated areas. My framerate could be 80 inside and drop to 14 outdoors or in flight. It made no sense, as it had been fine for a whole month.

Initially, I figured that the problem must be spyware or a virus. After scanning my computer, however, I found only a few minor infections that were easily cleaned, but still saw no return to the exceptional performance that I had been experiencing. So, I thought that perhaps my driver had somehow become corrupted. I uninstalled the driver, restarted the computer in safe mode, use DriverCleaner to check for nVidia, then installed a fresh Extreme-G Driver (this one was 83.9, I believe). However, this did not solve my problem. I still experienced the same issues of massive fluxuations in my framerate.

Since then, I have tried about 10 different extreme-g drivers. (5 versions, testing each with and without the modifications). Unfortunately, I have not had any luck. I started to suspect that I had a faulty video card, but I have no real way that I know of to figure that out since it runs "fine" with standard issue drivers from dell, even though the performance is far beneath what I have seen this card do.

Today, I found the ZeroPoint drivers and I was hoping that perhaps one of them is a great World of Warcraft driver for the 6800 Go Ultra. I guess what I am hoping is that someone has a very similar (identical would be even better) configuration to mine and also plays Warcraft so that they could tell me what driver they use and what kind of performance they get. At the very least, that would allow me to match the driver and settings and figure out if it's a problem specific to my computer or not. Ideally, I would love to find out the absolute best driver for my video card, and settings to use on that driver to get back to the exellent performance that I had before.

Also, I would be more than happy to run other tests to try and figure out what kind of problem I have (if the computer even has a problem) I just need to know what kind of tests to run.

Thanks a ton!

-Jon

fobis · May 3, 2006, 11:14 PM

Welcome, to DriverHeaven, vindication!
Did you make sure you did stuff like defragment your drive to see if that affected performance at all? If files from your drive were being accessed slowly, that could be the cause of your problem. Also, make sure you have probably at least 5-10GB free since Windows really slows down once you get lower than that...
And as for drivers, I'd say try the latest DHzer0point release and see what it gets you. I, myself, don't have anything close to your system, nor can I really use nVidia drivers seeing as how I have an ATi card...

I hope you find what you're looking for and that someone here will be able to provide you with more insight on this topic.
And again, welcome!

vindication · May 4, 2006, 07:27 PM

Thanks for the advice, Fobis!

Unfortunately, I have both cleared up space on my drive and defragmented.

I also opened up my computer and cleaned out all the dust that had accumulated in there. I'm starting to think that it's not a driver issue, seeing as I have tried so many different driver to no avail, and the performance since my reformat/disk space clearing seems to have nothing to do with what exactly is on screen. It now seems entirely random when it slows down.

I am completely lost. I have no idea what this could be.... bad video card? bad ram? bad hard drive?

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond!