NVIDIA Driver Update Causing Video Cards To Overheat In Games

After a group of StarCraft II beta testers reported technical difficulties following the installation of NVIDIA driver update 196.75, Blizzard tech support found that the update introduced fan control problems that were causing video cards to overheat in 3D applications. "This means every single 3D application (i.e. games) running these drivers is going to be exposed to overheating and in some extreme cases it will cause video card, motherboard and/or processor damage. If said motherboard, processor or graphic card is not under warranty, some gamers are in serious trouble playing intensive games such as Prototype, World of Warcraft, Farcry 3, Crysis and many other games with realistic graphics." NVIDIA said they were investigating the problem, took down links to the new drivers, and advised users to revert to 196.21 until the problem can be fixed.

Glad it didn't fry mine.

[Beelzebud]

Oddly enough, I played World of Warcraft and Fallout 3 quite a bit since upgrading to these drivers, and my performance has been much better than the previous win7 64x driver. I hear the fan ramping up like it should, and the card hasn't gotten close to overheating. Maybe it's only affecting certain models. I have an 8800ultra.

Re:Processor damage, really?

[theeddie55]

if it causes a short circuit, the feedback could easily blow the CPU, though in practice, any half decent power supply should cut out before that can happen.

Re:Processor damage, really?

[mkairys]

Laptops for example generally have the same heat pipe connected to the CPU and GPU. If one overheats, so can the other.

A little more info from the story

[L4t3r4lu5]

The EVGA tool has been used to manually set fan speed to 77% to compensate. I see no reason for other low-level customisation tools (RivaTuner etc) to not behave in the same way.

If you get a performance boost from this new driver, download RivaTuner or a similar tool and manually set the fan speed for gaming.

Re:Wow

[assemblerex]

You know they are workingon a beta of wow that is 100% graphics overhaul. It is probably that version.

Re:Terrible design

[rotide]

Software (read: applications) isn't destroying hardware in this case. The hardware itself is now "faulty" as the drivers have a pretty bad bug.

In my mind, this is no different than taking the the heatsink/fan off a CPU. That's a hardware issue. Doesn't matter what games, etc, you run, you risk killing that CPU because the CPU is under an abnormal operating condition.

While drivers are in control in the case we have here with nVidia, I see the drivers as part of the hardware since they were released by the manufacturer.

Re:If it ain't broke..

[Mascot]

I'm not sure how GPU-Z showing me below 30% load (on an almost two year old card) is proving the point you implicitly appear to try to make..?