NVIDIA To Allow GeForce 900M Overclocking in Notebooks Again

By Nathan Kirsch

gtx980m

NVIDIA taketh away and NVIDIA giveth back. Earlier this month NVIDIA released a new GeForce driver build (GeForce Driver 347.29) that disabled the overclocking features on some notebook users with GeForce GTX 980M graphics. NVIDIA played it off by basically saying that overclocking should have never been enabled in the first place.

Unfortunately GeForce notebooks were not designed to support overclocking. Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects.

There was a bug introduced into our drivers which enabled some systems to overclock. This was fixed in a recent update. Our intent was not to remove features from GeForce notebooks, but rather to safeguard systems from operating outside design limits. said Manuel G.

This statement was found to be unacceptable by the NVIDIA customers and after a week of petitions and complaints it appears that NVIDIA has had a change of heart and will be bringing back the overclocking option in the next driver release.

As you know, we are constantly tuning and optimizing the performance of your GeForce PC.We obsess over every possible optimization so that you can enjoy a perfectly stable machine that balances game, thermal, power, and acoustic performance. Still, many of you enjoy pushing the system even further with overclocking. Our recent driver update disabled overclocking on some GTX notebooks. We heard from many of you that you would like this feature enabled again. So, we will again be enabling overclocking in our upcoming driver release next month for those affected notebooks. If you are eager to regain this capability right away, you can also revert back to 344.75. said PeterS.

This news shows that NVIDIA is listening to their customers and should make many people happy. No word on when the new driver will be out, but NVIDIA has been really cranking out the drivers these days!