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I have a GeForce GTX 660 installed as my main card, and a friend of mine gave me their old GT 240 to use as a dedicated PhysX card (for games like Batman and Black Flag) to pick up some of the extra slack and, ideally, improve overall gaming performance.

However, I seem to have run into an issue when it comes to the driver. The newest supported driver version is 340.52 (pub. 7/29/2014) for the GT 240 and 347.25 (pub. 1/22/2015) for the GTX 660. The newer driver adds stability for a variety of games as well as things like MFAA, DSR, etc. I'd very much like to have this newer driver, but when I install it the driver for the GT 240 disappears and is replaced with a generic Microsoft driver.

When I try to install the driver again from the list, the GT 240 doesn't show up. So I manually install from the location where the drivers were unzipped originally (C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\340.52\) which installs the proper driver and prompts for a reboot.

Upon rebooting the machine, I find that my GTX 660 driver has also been mysteriously reverted to this older driver meant for the GT 240. If I install the newer driver on the new card, I'm prompted to reboot and the entire system continues.

Is it simply imcompatible? Is there no hope for this card to by a dedicated PhysX card for my rig simply because of a driver incompatibility? Can I do something so that one card uses one driver and the other uses a newer, better version?

Can I make this work?

Hennes
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Cora
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  • In my experience, the 660 handles phyx fine on its own. I *distinctly* seem to remember reading somewhere it was a good idea to use a card within 2 generations for phyx as well, but not sure where that was. – Journeyman Geek Jan 26 '15 at 05:59
  • @JourneymanGeek The 660 can handle PhysX, yes, but it has trouble when the games it's rendering are already maxing it out. Namely Black Flag and the Batman series. – Cora Jan 28 '15 at 11:14

2 Answers2

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I think they are made incompatible by newer drivers as you have noticed. Windows handled it well for you, but for me and Keltari it blue screens when mixing new (Kepler) and obsolete (Tesla) with current drivers. You also are mixing variations of Kepler and Tesla.

So in a mix system like this it's safer to select the older model card on he driver download page; worst case booting into low-res mode or using a restore point.

I don't see how you can get away with running the newer display drivers.

Louis Waweru
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I have a different issue. However, my solution (hopefully temporary) might work for you.

I have a GTX 760 and a 9600 GT in my PC. Whenever I update the driver for GTX 760 it shows the 9600 as a different model. If I install and reboot, I get a bluescreen. I fount if I remove the 9600 first, everything works. I dont know why and after lots of troubleshooting, at this point I dont really care.

However, this might work for you. Leave in your 660 and remove your 240, perform the update and reboot so everything is complete. Shut down, then install the 240. Hopefully, everything will work.

Keltari
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  • Tried this, didn't work. My BIOS trips up whenever I remove/reinsert the card. It will fail to boot twice, then boot into UEFI the third time where I can load a saved profile. After that Windows will load fine. It did install the 240, however, the 660 driver was apparently rolled back when that happened. – Cora Jan 26 '15 at 05:15
  • @keltari I happen to have the same hardware and the problem is breaking changes in drivers starting some time ago. They'll work fine together if you choose to download the drivers for the 9600 GT. – Louis Waweru Jan 26 '15 at 05:37
  • Not that I wouldn't pull the 9600 GT too... – Louis Waweru Jan 26 '15 at 05:46