Wondering what people feel is the best driver?  Please bear with me while I explain the background on this though........

 

A couple weeks ago I started having some weird random blue-screens in the middle of the night and a couple hard locks while playing FSX. The blue screens pointed to the driver verifier so I updated some old drivers assuming Windows updates may have messed with them and made them unstable.  I had updated my old (2010 era) Saitek X52 drivers, Logitech Setpoint (also 2010 era), and my video drivers from 310.90 to the latest 320.49.  I think I figured out afterwords that the big culprit was actually a recent Windows Update that claimed to be a new driver for my Sidewinder X6 keyboard but in reality was a new mouse & keyboard center that installed a tab in the mouse panel.  I think it was conflicting with my other USB devices and causing problems.  I have since ripped it out and gone back to the plain Intellitype software and removed Setpoint from Logitech entirely because the new version wouldn't let the video card downclock to desktop "2D" speed.

 

However since upgrading the video driver and all the other stuff I'm experiencing a weird problem with FSX that I believe is video driver related.  I can be taxiing along or flying or whatever and randomly the screen will pause, the sound will make a "brrrrrrrrrrrrrpt" sound for a second, and then withing a total of about 2 seconds everything recovers and keeps going.  I also noticed some rather large "tearing" or graphical glitches that I didn't have before (and I'm running 1/2 refresh rate 30fps vsync) when panning around in spot view.  I uninstalled 320.49 last night and ran Driver Sweeper to ensure everything was gone and installed the 314.22's that I've seen recommended a few times around here.

 

I'm wondering what you guys think.  Should I try the 314's, or just go all the way back to the 310's and see how the system behaves?  I think I saw a few other posts on various forums of FSX issues with the latest drivers so that's why I'm thinking it's the new Nvidia drivers not playing well.  Just for good measure I double checked that my sound, WLan, and video cards were all seated well, and I reseated all my ram modules as well.

I'm running 320.49 without any problems on my GTX460, but I also ran 301s and 310s without problems..

 

There is no harm in trying a different video driver, but the 320.49s are pretty solid for me ^_^

Well, I don't want to jinx myself but it looks like 314.22 has fixed the issue.  It would usually happen within a few minutes and I loaded up a flight and 10 minutes later nothing.  Pretty heavy load this time with major thunderstorms and heavy cloud cover where I was at too (also tried with the clear weather theme).