Tag Archives: NVIDIA Drivers

1080p HDTV as second monitor display blinks on and off while watching video

I have a second monitor which is a Philips 1080p 40 inch TV (that I switch the HDMI inputs to alternate between cable and a second monitor).

When I play streaming video from YouTube on the monitor, the display blinks on and off continuously.  This does NOT happen when using the Philips for TEXT displays (outlook, explorer, etc.)

The fix is easy.

First, make sure your second monitor (HDTV) is in “PC” mode. (This is not the fix in itself).

Secondly, I have the most current NVIDIA drivers installed.

Go to NVIDIA CONTROL PANEL (right click on an empty desktop)

Click ADJUST DESKTOP COLOR SETTINGS

click on your secondary monitor name (in my case, PHILIPS)

You will see a dropdown box appear.

Set “content reported to the desktop” to “Desktop Programs”.

 

That’s it.

Your secondary monitor should now be rock stable while watching videos.

 

let me know if this helped you!

NVIDIA Geforce 480 core clock drop to 405mhz v270.61 v275.33 CUDA

We participate in the BOINC CUDA project to use idle CPU and GPU time for scientific research purposes.

We recently updated to the newest NVIDIA drivers for Windows 7 x64 which are version 270.61.

After doing this we noticed the core clock on our NVIDIA Geforce 480 would drop from a standard or overclocked speed, down to 405mhz.  The core clock would stick there and the only way we can get it back is to reboot that machine.  Then after a few minutes again running the BOINC app, the core clock would drop to 405mhz again.  (We can see this because we use the MSI Afterburner 2.1 app, which has a nice real-time graph that shows current clock, memory and GPU utilizations among other things and also allows you to overclock the card.)

It turns out that there is some new “feature” (or bug) in the NVIDIA v. 207.61 drivers that is causing this issue.

Our solution was to uninstall the 270.61 drivers, restart and then install v266.58 drivers (which are the ones that preceeded 270.61).

After a reboot and more testing the core clock speed stay at the factory default speed (700mhz) or at our designated overclocked speed, without ever dropping down to 405mhz.

Apparently this is a widespread issue and users playing 3D based games also experience this issue as dropped frame or sluggish framerates while gaming… those users should also think about reverting to 266.58 until NVIDIA gets this sorted out.

We’ll have more information after we test the next version of NVIDIA’s drivers.

 

UPDATE 06/22/2011:  The same “clock drop” is also experienced on the most current NVIDIA 275.33 drivers.  Don’t use those if you plan on using CUDA.