Should I Mess with Drivers?

[Jim VonSeggern]

Hey Toms,

Have a quick noob question ... I just did a new build a couple days ago with an EVGA GTX 660 Superclock. I installed Nvidia 320.49 WHQL at the time.

I'm about to swap the 660 out for an MSI GTX 760.

Do I need to mess with drivers all, or is it as simple as plopping the new hardware in and I'm off and running.

Thanks much,

Jim

 

[DjDafiDak]

yes you should, uninstall all grapichs drivers, plug in ur new gpu, and download the latest drivers and install again.

 

[Gam3r01]

Whenever changing hardware, unless its an identical piece, you want to uninstall all the drivers related to it. If you don the computer will boot to BSOD or similar errors until you put the old hardware back in and uninstall the drivers. You can Download the new drivers before the new card but you still want to not have any drivers related to the hardware change installed.

 

[Tom Tancredi]

I am not in agreement here. As both are NVidia cards, then your supposed to be able to just 'swap out and your off' because that is why they UNIFIED the drivers to make it that easy. Now if you were swapping between Nvidia to ATi or vice versa yeah you need to do alot more.

 

[Gam3r01]

Thats not so, each driver is specific to a card model, you try to swap a 5450 out with a 7750 for example you are going to have a bad time if you dont remove all the drivers.

 

[Tom Tancredi]

Gam3r01: I am sorry but your completely wrong. To update your information http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html and http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-ready-with-unified-2009jul22.aspx . Way before that was true, you had to get one card driver which was different, but both AMD and NVIDIA unified their drivers into a all in one solution. They do occassionally repackage the drivers to just accomodate M (mobile) based cards, which is a smaller package, but that still encompasses ALL M based cards.

 

[Gam3r01]

When I upgraded my gpu I was under that info. Which was wrong. Blue screened at every corner until I went through and uninstalled the old drivers and then it ran fine. Even if you can use the same drivers, you never want to remove hardware when drivers are installed for it, never a good plan.

 

[17seconds]

While it may be possible to just plug and play a new GPU over the existing drivers, it's not good practice. To avoid any potential hassles or unknown errors cropping up it's always best to do a fresh/clean installation. One of the number one recommended fixes on these forums is to simply do a clean install of drivers, so it's best to just start off that way at the beginning.

 

[coozie7]

A quick check on the Nvidia site shows that 320.49 is the current driver, there's no need to do anything.