Best video drivers, Lenovo or Third Party?

[eghck]

I’ve noticed that Lenovo doesn’t keep their video drivers up to date. I have an x1400 and the latest update is based off Catalyst 7.6? which added support for Vista. Before that the Lenovo supplied driver was based off Catalyst 6.9 or 6.10? The latest Catalyst build is 7.10.

Do any of you use any drivers other than the standard Lenovo supplied drivers? I’ve heard of Omegadrivers, and Driver Heaven’s tool to mod desktop drivers for laptops. What are my best choices for performance drivers XP, and how stable are they?

How about those with Nvidia cards or Intel gpus? I may edit this topic to keep track of people's experiences with certain drivers to see how up to date we can expect to be in regards to video drivers.

EDIT: Latest reported stable drivers

ATI
Available
Lenovo 8.383, ATI Catalyst 7.10, Omega 3.8.421

Stable
X1400
Lenovo 8.294, ATI Catalyst 7.10, Omega ?.?.???


NVIDIA
Available
Lenovo 6.14, www.Laptop2go.com,

Stable
NVS 140M
Lenovo ?.??, Laptop2go 163.44 (xp.64)

[wackydan]

Lenovo chooses what drivers to wrap for its systems, hence why you may see newer drivers for ATI or Nvidia out there vs on the Lenovo site. When Lenovo finds a stability issue.support issue on the driver with customers they typically will update it ahead of their normal schedule.

Using other drivers means that support won't be as friendly

It also means that you may break other components of software.... ie; presentation director - though I don;t know if their are any hooks between that utility and the Lenovo baked drivers from ATI or Nvidia.

[gunston]

i'm using Omega catalyst driver now...

[BradS]

Well I have the nVidia 140M card. I have been using the LaptopVideo2Go drivers for a few months now. No problems, and it runs games much better then the Lenovo video drivers. I'm using driver version 163.44..

[Agotthelf]

Same experiences here with Ati 7.10 +CCC on an R60 with X1400.

my R60 runs very smoothly, especially switching from power saving mode to maximum power is much better and without flickering the screen, like the lenovo driver does.

Yippi yeah!