Can conflicting drivers cause a PC to slow down?

CTxR

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Oct 20, 2015
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I recently upgraded from and AMD athlon 860K and a gtx 750 ti to an i5-6600 and a gtx 1060.

I had all the drivers for AMD for about 1 and a half months after changing to intel (i had the intel ones installed as well).
I recently uninstall anything AMD related on my pc and it seems to have sped up, whilst on idle work loads, so general windows use and stuff. Before, I'd get a few random freezes but now its all smooth.

Was this due to conflicting drivers? or another factor?
 
Solution
Yes drivers can cause issues. There's a number of driver cleanup uninstall tools out there. There's probably no other PC component other than the GPU that will receive driver updates as much as they do. Not all end up making things better. It's not a team red or green thing. Both sides have occasional issues.


With NV there's also an option during install called 'clean install'. I recommend it but it will also delete any custom settings. It will uninstall all of the previous NV drivers and then install the new ones. You'll likely need to a restart, maybe 2 and then reconfigure any special settings you use.

ledhead11

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Oct 10, 2014
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5,160
Yes drivers can cause issues. There's a number of driver cleanup uninstall tools out there. There's probably no other PC component other than the GPU that will receive driver updates as much as they do. Not all end up making things better. It's not a team red or green thing. Both sides have occasional issues.


With NV there's also an option during install called 'clean install'. I recommend it but it will also delete any custom settings. It will uninstall all of the previous NV drivers and then install the new ones. You'll likely need to a restart, maybe 2 and then reconfigure any special settings you use.
 
Solution