RivaTuner 2.24c supported nvidia drivers?

I haven't tried out Riva 2.24 yet, but did read an article about NV driver 196.21 restricting OCing. You may want to try driver 190.38, this is the first driver I've tried that would match the performance of 177.79 and I tested at least a half dozen in-between.

PS: whenever changing drivers always monitor temps and fan speed ( installed driver 178.24 and the GPU fan wasn't spinning)

Edit: found the link for ya if you want to have a look. http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/01/21/latest-nvidia-dr...

Complete shite!, here are the fixed drivers.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/Videocards---NVIDIA-ForceWare-Vista_c32.html

Thanks for the intel  Wow man the fan issue sound like some heavy drivers faliure. Anyways, im using 191.07 right now until they release a new driver without the stupid OC protecting if thats whats spooking.

Check my link, I don't think there was any 'OC protecting' going on the drivers were simply borked which happens but I'm using the new 196.34's and the ability to OC is working fine now all the sliders are back where they used to be.

MouseMonkey gave you a pretty good list to choose from at Guru3D, they even have a better list to choose from than the Nvidia site. You may want to try 3 or 4 different versions. Each one is going to get different results, some won't OC as well as others. Try to find one that matches up best to your hardware. Run a couple of graphic intensive bench tests. Test a couple of your favorite games, watching closely in game play for dropped frames and low frame count (something I've encountered in the past).

Geeze, I thought I was going crazy. I just installed dirt2 and I wanted to overclock my 8800 gt's and no program would let me. I downloaded every oc utility known to man. Thanks for figuiring this out guys ! Going for the latest drivers now !