Nvidia Pulls Graphics Card-frying 196.75 Driver
Nvidia has pulled its 196.75 driver amid complaints that it's malfunctioning and frying graphics cards.
According to incgamers, several people have had their PC or video cards croak after installing the Nvidia 196.75 drivers. StarCraft II Beta players were the first to notice a problem and following complaints that it was something to do with the latest patch from Blizzard, Blizzard tech support explained that the problem is Nvidia's latest driver and Starcraft II Beta is not the only application affected
Blizzard says the problem has to do with the driver's fans control not working properly. This in turn causes the card to overheat and in some cases it can cause video card, motherboard and/or processor damage. Blizzard support has instructed all players to uninstall the driver immediately and use the older 196.21.
"We're getting reports where users are getting intermittent low FPS after installing these drivers. It seems that it is related to the fan control included in these drivers not working correctly and is causing the video card to overheat on 3D applications. This will affect Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 Beta. Please uninstall the drivers and revert back to the older ones."
When contacted by incgamers, Nvidia said it was aware of the issue and that the drivers had been pulled until they can verify a root cause.
"We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our Web site in the meantime."
We'll keep you posted on this one. In the meantime, has anyone experienced this particular problem? Let us know in the comments below.
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I have had enough problems with the 196.21 drivers thanks ... and I was thinking of rolling back another notch.
Cheers
If it is truely a driver ussue, I hope the response for NVIDIA is better that theirs for the defective laptop GPUs, I have a HOP Laptop which is is a doorstop.
I have those drivers on my game machine but it's water cooled so I've had no problems.
When it rains it pours!
Looks like NVIDIA is taking a cue from ATI's past years when it comes to driver quality...
geeez nvidia hitting brick walls everywhere
)
Well, last night before installing Bad company 2 I thought I'd install nVidia's latest drivers. I had no problems with Bad Company 2 in beta, but last night, with the new drivers, my computer rebooted after just 2 hours of play. Guess I'll be doing some rollback.
Or use Rivatuner to manually turn the fan speed up.
Great a new and fantastic way to turn my sli box into a hog dog rotisserie oven....still using 191.7 :s at least my 8400gs can still do phsyx.
Tims to buy a 5800
I had a problem with slow frame rates in Fallout 3 and didn't wait for someone to tell me there was a problem. I've been using EVGA precision tool and noticed right away my card was running hotter. I immediately rolled my driver back.
Honestly, I've learned that when using Geforce cards always have Rivatuner on with you. I've had the 7900GTX, 8800GTS, GTX 260 and whenever I play games even if the temp of GPU shots to 65+ degrees celsius the stupid fan won't go faster than 30%. Only after I popped in Rivatuner from Guru3D did I realize how strong that fan can be.
Now when my GPU gets to 50+ the fan speed hits at least 50%...tehehhe...set it to 100% fan speed it's kind of fun...it's like a freaken vaccum.
Well, I think that I have this driver version and my GTX260 is running at 50C on idle, now that I know this, I will uninstall this driver version and install a previous version.
What I'd be interested in hearing is Nvidia going to give free replacements for the video cards that have been fried, if it does turn out to be case that the drivers caused the damage.
A responsible company would, however Nvidia of late I'm not to sure about, I've been a consistent user of Nvidia cards, but my next one is going to be an ATI one.
So are ATi going to compensate those who have been affected by the GSOD/vertical lines issue? After all there are users that will have lost valuable productivity and gaming time not to mention the emotional stress of trying to fix a problem that was not of their own making.
of course they would warranty it. I put my video card in the slot wrong and fried it and they still warrantied it. They are very lax on the return policy from my experience and this is their fault anyways.
Problems with warcraft 3? are you serious? since when does that game tax any more then 10 percent of any modern GPU, even at the highest settings.
WOW... ATI has better drivers???
this actually fried my sons computer yesterday.... is nvidia going to pay for this?
What, they think they still dominate the market? They better fire someone responsible and pull their sh!t together.
Video card issues are probably the #1 bricker of Laptops.
Given the installed base, I bet ATI cards have a much higher % of failures.
I have a 2004 Sony/ATI bricked . The current owners of ATI, the OIL Barons don't care much about the legacy hardware, in case you didn't know.
I don't know about anybody else, but personally, when I start gaming on my GTX275 SLI, I always take control of the cards' fans in Precision tool and set it to 100%, for that exact reason...
Any specific cards or just all of them?
@barmaley,+1 on monitoring your temps and adjusting fans manually.
hmmm... could this be related to GPU accelerated flash applications as well?
since the driver update, wife's pc kept crashing while she's tending her Farm. can run Crysis but not Farmville???
hmmm... could this be related to GPU accelerated flash applications as well? since the driver update, wife's pc kept crashing while she's tending her Farm. can run Crysis but not Farmville???
lol saying its his wife on Farmville and not him
What does WHQL mean?
hmmm... could this be related to GPU accelerated flash applications as well?
since the driver update, wife's pc kept crashing while she's tending her Farm. can run Crysis but not Farmville???
If it warms up the GPU then yes, but as others have pointed out if you use a third party monitoring software and/or fan controller then just turn the fans up manually. I've been using this driver for the last few days and hadn't noticed any issues but then my fans for the 8800's are run the mobo and are at 100% all the time and my 9500GT doesn't get hot even when folding.
What does WHQL mean?
Windows Hardware Quality Laboratory, I think.
I wonder if these drivers were released in anticipation of the 400 series and was sort of a "test" driver, to see if they could both work simultaneously. As the GTX 400 hardware is vastly different from the previous generation, perhaps they need two different sets of drivers?
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/0 [...] thrashing/
A few GTX 470 benches.
@barmaley,+1 on monitoring your temps and adjusting fans manually.
This is why i hate the GT2xx series. When i tested the GT260 and GT280 i noticed how hot they are, so I jumped straight from a 8800GTX to a 4870 and never looked back. NO MORE fiddling with the drivers and burning myself on my video cards.
I repair laptop MBs and video cards for a living, and i can tell you i get lots of nvidia GT2xx series cards with dead GPUs from overheating or chips that need reballing. It's not really nvidia's fault, it's the OEM's fault for using crappy ROHS BGA kits with VGA cards that run around 80-100 degrees.
Video card issues are probably the #1 bricker of Laptops.Given the installed base, I bet ATI cards have a much higher % of failures.I have a 2004 Sony/ATI bricked . The current owners of ATI, the OIL Barons don't care much about the legacy hardware, in case you didn't know.
@barmaley,+1 on monitoring your temps and adjusting fans manually.
Actually, most bricked laptops come from #1 HP, #2 Sony and #3 Dell. It's 90% Nvidia chipsets, mostly MCPs (northbridges with on board VGA), especially the 430 / 6150 on HP DV2000/6000/9000, and GF 8600/9500 on Pavillion DV6000 / 9000 series. Again, CRAPPY COOLING.
this actually fried my sons computer yesterday.... is nvidia going to pay for this?
How did it fried your son's PC? I could understand the card being fried but the whole PC?