A Beta of version 180 of the NVidia drivers are now available for Windows XP. Please try them out and post your experiences in this thread.

Cheers,

MJH

Ran it on the day it was released. No performance gains. No difference in system stability. Lets just call it the far cry 2 release ;).

The new driver hangs my computer, most likely due to an overheating problem as the cooling fan on the graphic card (GTX 260) never starts.

JOE

GPU-Z can monitor which fan speed is set (don't know if it's the real speed though). And in the performance tab of the driver there's a slider to control the fan manually. Maybe you have to install the nvidia system tools to get the option.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

OK, GPU-Z says that the fan is running at 40% speed, whereas in nVidia Control Panel it shows 0%. However, I can't change the fan speed manually (the bar is grayed out), which I could do with the previous driver version (178.08) used.

JOE

My control panel is also grayed out, but I don't have the stock fan connected any more. Don't know how this changes things. You could also try Riva Tuner, though I think it's one of the more non-intuitive to use programs. But it also has a fan speed slider.
Does your card use the stock cooler or another one? Either way you may want to report this problem to nVidia (and hope it somehow makes a difference somewhere). And maybe try the 178.24 or 178.13 driver, which seem to have been fine.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

It seem there is a bug with the fan speed control/monitoring. I have eVGA Geforce 9600GT using driver 180.42 and fan option is disabled in the eVGA tool. Work fine with GPUGRID.

180 works with Riva on my 8800GTs 512. I am able to change the speed of the fan, and the O/C setting stayed.

My card uses the stock cooler, and now I have also tried Riva Tuner. What happened when running the 180 driver was that the fan tab disappeared in Riva Tuner. So now I am using the 178.24 driver, and everything seems fine so far.

I will report this cooling issue to nVidia.

JOE

When I got ready to download and I saw this for the windows version for 8800gt

Release Highlights:

With no release notes I decided not to try it out.