NVIDIA GeForce Driver Installation Guide - How to Download the Latest Drivers Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,383 words · ~6 min read
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well I'm always telling my viewers go to the manufacturer's website and download
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the latest drivers but what I have never actually done is showing you how if
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there's anybody who doesn't know so today I'm going to be giving you oh
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helps if you spell NVIDIA right today I'm going to be doing a video guide on
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how to install NVIDIA's Graphics drivers
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so I'm going to be installing the driver for a GTX 480 card so the first thing
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I've done is I've gone to NVIDIA.com and then I'm going to hover over if I
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can get my mouse to go there there we go I'm G to hover over download drivers and
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then I'm going to go to download drivers so far this is pretty
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straightforward okay so here we go now I'm going to manually Find the drivers
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for my NVIDIA products so I know that I'm using a GeForce uh there's all the
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other options here as well uh so I'm using a GeForce I'm using a 400 series
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of 480 but they've got options for all the other gForce series as well I
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actually have cards in my uh in my storage room that go back as far as this
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nothing here though nothing here anyway so this is a GT GeForce 400 series the
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particular card I'm installing drivers for is the 480 and then I am using Windows 7 64bit
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if you want to check which copy of uh Windows you have whether you're running
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Vista or Windows 7 you just click on the start menu right click on computer go to
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properties and then you you can see right somewhere right there system type
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64-bit operating system so if you need to double check then just make sure
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there that way you download the correct driver for your system all right so
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we've got all the options selected I speak English and I don't think they
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have an English Canada H queen's English
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excellent I'm going to download the UK drivers just for fun okay so you click
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yes it tells you the drivers okay these are Wile certified so it means they
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should be cable they're good for Windows 7 64bit shows me here release highlights
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so you can see how much stuff gets fixed in updated drivers I don't I don't tell
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you this for my own Amusement I mean look at this 24% better performance in
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this game 25% better in this game 10%
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better in some technology demo upgrades
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physics support adds support for New Quality mode does all this stuff so
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there's a reason that I tell you never use the drivers that come on the disc
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click agree and download always use the ones from the manufacturer's website so
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I'm going to save these uhuh I'm going to save these to
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the desktop and NVIDIA has a very
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fast okay some UK ad NVIDIA has very
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fast download servers so at my home I am
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getting almost 2 megabytes per second down from NVIDIA's server that means
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even though their drivers are a huge 155 Megs it's still only going to take about
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a minute and a half to 2 minutes so that's how long I have to sit here and
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ramble I guess this would be a problem if you have dialup then you'd be in for
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a real treat I mean man that would take
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forever oh it looks like it was just Shaw's speed boost thing I'm not
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actually getting 2 megabytes per second but if I had a better internet connection then I
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would guess I could go downstairs and get a drink from the
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fridge that wouldn't be all that professional though would
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it still contemplating okay maybe I'll just turn off the camera for now all
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right the download is complete so I click run
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yes okay and whoops ouch please wait file
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the files are saved to your computer when complete the driver installation
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will start so you can read that on your own now cuz I zoomed in I have my juice
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now see there's my juice my Vancouver
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conu mug okay so click next for NVIDIA setup
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let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit so you read through this in great detail
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and then click yes then it installs the driver software
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installing drivers really isn't all that difficult but uh where a lot of people
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run into trouble is if they're not uh not super computer savvy and they're not
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sure you know who the manufacturer is for a particular piece of Hardware like
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say for example they've got a video card and they know it's made by MSI but they
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don't know if it's made by NVIDIA or ATI
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um the Ford Partners tend to have the latest drivers but they don't always
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have the very latest and they usually don't have betas and stuff like that
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available on their site so it's always better to go directly to ati's site for
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Radon drivers and NVIDIA's site for GeForce drivers so why bother installing
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a driver at all well uh performance differences and also it gives you a lot
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more flexibility in configuring your computer I'm just going to sort of minimize this it's just going to keep
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doing what it's doing and so you see I'm actually missing the NVIDIA control
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panel here I have no access to the NVIDIA control panel at all until I've
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installed the driver so the NVIDIA control panel gives us all kinds of
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different options for stuff that we can do with our displays things
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like just going to go under the desk
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here things like SLI if you have two video cards like that uh things like
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configuring fizx uh things like setting up three displays at a time so these are
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all very very important things yes I want to restart my
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computer this is an SSD based system so it should
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restart pretty quick
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here I'm going to go ahead and get a drink of my
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juice the point of this video is just how easy it is to install your own
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Graphics
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drivers
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I actually have a lot of people comment on this how my Windows is never genuine
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and it's always up after the activation period the reason is that I'm changing
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Hardware all the time so when you change Hardware all the time it's actually very
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very obnoxious to reactivate it every single time you change a video card or
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change a CPU or change a motherboard so I don't bother anymore it is genuine
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software but yeah I cannot be bothered to run the stupid call Microsoft every
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single time I change a single piece of hardware on the machine it doesn't make
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sense so yeah I'm aware of the little message this copy of Windows is not
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genuine I just don't care because it is genuine I just haven't gotten around to
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activating it on my real machine I believe it's active
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although it might not be on that one either okay so here we go here is all
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the options we have in the NVIDIA control panel now that we have our driver installed that was fairly simple
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so we can set up things like stereoscopic 3D because we do have 3D
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Vision glasses as well as a an IR transmitter or emitter rather um we can
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set up 3D settings we can adjust image
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settings and we can change SL physics configurations we can change all this
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different stuff we can set up multiple displays that's a pretty cool feature
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see we can do all kinds of stuff so thank you for checking out my how to
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install your NVIDIA GeForce drivers and
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don't forget to subscribe to my video blog for more Tech tips