Nvidia Disables GTX 900m Overclocking with Driver Update

WYP

News Guru
It seems that with Nvidia's newest Geforce 347.29 drivers that overclocking is disables on Nvidia's newest GTX 900 Series Mobile GPUs.

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Read more on Nvidia Disabling Overclocking on GTX 900m Series GPUs here.
 
Thats stupid. There are actually some gaming laptops that have more than sufficient cooling to support heavy OCing. Alienware for example and I presume MSI's thicker laptops are also good at overclocking too. Not all laptops are £600 960m equipped laptops that have average cooling.

People are still going to defend Nvidia over this though. If AMD can pull of decent mobile GPUs I'd be suprised mind, they've never been that good in my experience.
 
In this case I 100% agree with nVidia, however it would be nice to leave the decision at the discretion of the laptop manufacturer, but ultimately probably not the user.

JR
 
ahem 7970m, lovely card without enduro. I mean seriously it has been rebranded till the m290x and its performance is still pretty darn good, just give it a good OC. Then again my Gtx 680ms OC'd are better ;)

Also am I missing something, or could the end user simply use an older driver? I know this isnt a good solution, however it could be an option until someone finds a way around it. Then again most of the chips are pretty good performers.
 
God the amount of people with their heads stuck in the ground on the facebook comments saying overclocking in a laptop will kill it, maybe if its a low end laptop but most high end gaming laptops have good enough cooling to allow this.

My Clevo allows me to overclock my GTX680 enough to get about 10fps more in BF4 on ultra meaning instead over hovering around 30fps its 40 which makes it a lot more playable.

At the rate nvidia keep screwing people over im never going to touch a product of theirs again.
 
I do agree that overclocking mobile chips even if over shorter periods of time shows good benefits, over time it just destroys the chip so much quicker and makes the laptop a lot more prone to hardware failure.

But at the same time, I think Nvidia could just put together a piece of OC software and specifically point out what will be the side effects of OC, and just let user decide.


Nvidia makes GPU's they don't need to worry about side effects of stupid users.
 
But isnt it really obvious to the end user when they OC? and I am pretty sure that there are warning pretty much everywhere and just about every single guide would have disclaimers.

Frankly I think Nvidia should just put in place something that detects manual OC and then just voids the warranty after the user knowingly violates their terms. Then again its easier said than done.

My 680m's have been OC'd for years in my p370em, and they are still running as good as they were when I first got them, even better actually with the OC. Temps never go above 70c either.
 
Maybe the new drivers won't allow an overclock, but there's no reason why a GPU BIOS flash with a higher stock clock cannot get around the problem. That's what I did on my old Alienware M18x anyway using nVflash.

Of course, whether your particular notebook can accept a custom GPU BIOS is another can of worms altogether. Manufacturers nowadays lock that system board down tighter than a nun's twat.

I'm glad I'm getting away from notebooks - my new system is a desktop with none of the restrictions or limitations I've had to go through dealing with notebooks over the years.
 
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Nvidia's arguments are obvious and acceptable. However if a user wants to overclock their laptop and knows the consequences they should be able to do it.

How many people will oc their laptops without even the slightest thought that it may hinder their temperatures inside?

It's not like someone totally oblivious tries to do something like that and gets burned for burning their hardware.
 
The problem is though that even though warranty should be void once the user OC's, whats there to stop them from claiming warranty anyways? There is no way to prove that they did or that they didnt.
 
ahem 7970m, lovely card without enduro. I mean seriously it has been rebranded till the m290x and its performance is still pretty darn good, just give it a good OC. Then again my Gtx 680ms OC'd are better ;)

Also am I missing something, or could the end user simply use an older driver? I know this isnt a good solution, however it could be an option until someone finds a way around it. Then again most of the chips are pretty good performers.

The cards are rather new and such a course of action would prevent you from accessing fixes as well as performance improvements.

While I can agree that laptop overclocking is generally pretty finicky, there are situations where it is useful.
Maybe you've purchased a cooling pad, perhaps you just have that headroom you'd want to use.

The problem is though that even though warranty should be void once the user OC's, whats there to stop them from claiming warranty anyways? There is no way to prove that they did or that they didnt.

If a card breaks when it is overclocked, it is either blatantly obvious or it would've broken even without the overclock.

And please link the source, even with screencaps.
 
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I think they should have a warning on the driver page or something.

And to be fair, how many "gamers" really know anything about overclocking? Out of all the people who game on windows i'm sure few know anything about it. I don't see a big problem with it. Plus if they are really determined to OC it they will just try to flash the bios to higher clocks.
 
NVIDIA gave reasons to OEMs (MSI,Gigabyte,ASUS etc...) to hate them. First the 970 issues then this. I mean those companies based their marketing for laptops that their super beefy laptops could get gpus to OC...
 
The cards are rather new and such a course of action would prevent you from accessing fixes as well as performance improvements.

While I can agree that laptop overclocking is generally pretty finicky, there are situations where it is useful.
Maybe you've purchased a cooling pad, perhaps you just have that headroom you'd want to use.



If a card breaks when it is overclocked, it is either blatantly obvious or it would've broken even without the overclock.

And please link the source, even with screencaps.

First of all, I never claimed OCing video card were either wrong nor without benefits. Second of all compromises have to be made. As I stated in my post, people can stay on an older driver version until a workaround is a available. I already said that it was not the greatest option, how about read over it. Thirdly, some people do not bother to constantly monitor their graphics card, once its stable to them, they sometimes do bother.... So no, not always obvious.
 
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NVIDIA is just full of crap on this. They must be trying to cover up engineering defects in Maxwell MXM. I certainly do not appreciate their acting like a dictatorship and deciding what I can or cannot do with my personal property. This is unethical, potentially illegal, and way overstepping boundaries.

In these runs my 980M cards temps peaked at 70°C.

Fire Strike Extreme run... http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/5921625

No reason not to overclock a decent laptop for benching... been doing it for years now without consequence. No huge need to overclock for simple gameplay for most, but life would be far too boring if all there was to do was play games. If you cut corners and buy a junky laptop to save a few bucks, it might get too hot, but thermals are never an issue with a good machine.

It sure did take them a LONG time to discover and fix that "bug" LOL. If they are going to be liars, they should at least try harder. They're not very good at it.

*URLs removed*

Edit: A moderator removed my URLs show examples of 4 generations of overclocked laptop performance that rivals or exceeds many health desktops. If anyone wants more proof send me a PM (or visit my HWBOT profile) and I will load you up with hundreds of examples of what kind of amazing overclocking a decent laptop is capable of. NVIDIA is full of baloney and must be trying to cover something up that they do not want discovered.
 
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