Well, I spent a few quality hours on a few different nvidia tweaking websites and discussion forums, whose members have nothing better to do than tweak old drivers for new cards, tweak new drivers for old cards, benchmark all the changes they make on different cards on different games, and then rant and rave about how one driver is vastly superior because it gets 1.5 more frames per second than another one.
I am seriously not making this up or being sarcastic.
Anyway, there are some saner heads in these forums too, and based on my readings, it seems that the 93.71 drivers are generally quite stable, about as fast as they should be, and seem to have a pretty high image quality too. So it seems I may have lucked into a good set of drivers from the get-go.
Thusfar, the only testing I've done is with AquaMark, AH in a hanger firing a jillion bullets from a Spit1, and with a Kill-O-Watt, which measures power consumption at the wall socket.
Both AM and AH seem to run fine - no crashes, no stutters, no artifacts, but I really haven't settled into a multi-hour gaming session to be sure.
Power consumption is quite good. With my old card, a 9800XT installed, my P4 SFF rig consumed 98 watts at idle, and 210 watts peak at the toughest point of Aquamark. With this 7600GT, the same PC consumes around 72 watts at idle and only 155 watts at AquaMark's peak. This machine only has a 250 watt power supply, BTW, and it has never EVER been a problem - remember, this is an SFF machine.
Anyway, more details as I finish testing it. Thanks for the help.
-Llama
