196.75 drivers dangerous, read here

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ubergeek14

Weaksauce
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Nov 16, 2007
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It seems that the new 196.75 drivers release from nVidia has been causing overheating in video cards due to an error in the drivers that affects variable fan control. The only way to control the fans is manually through another program. nVidia has quietly removed the 196.75 drivers and put the 196.21 drivers back up. I know this happened to me because last night I installed the new drivers, came back in the morning to see windows reporting that it had crashed in the night due to blue screen, and although at the time i was mystified, now I think i believe what the culprit was. As of right now, on the 196.75 drivers, my 8800GTS 512 is idling at 70C, while the ambient temperature in the room is 15C (it's cold in north florida, i keep the heat off and bundle up with blankets :D)

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161525
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161503

Reverting my drivers now, and all of you should do likewise!

EDIT: Simply reverting back to 196.21 reduced my GPU idle temp from 70C to 54C. Scary!
 
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I noted odd temps yesterday while playing BC2 on my 9800GX2, thanks for heads up.
 
Wow. I will certainly check that out this evening. Thanks for the heads up.
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These piece of shit drivers are a disaster, didn't notice the fan issue myself, not sure if it affected my card, I was also experiencing annoying issues and bugs with these drivers myself. Glad I reverted back to the previous drivers. How could NVIDIA not test these out properly before releasing it to the public. And some people say NVIDIA drivers are better than ATI's, yeah right.
 
Had No temperture problems but I decided to take them out and put back the 196.21in case.
thanks mate
 
http://www.incgamers.com/News/21293/nvidia-19675-kills-video-cards

Several StarCraft II beta testers have reported their PC or video cards have died after installing the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers. The large amount of reports have prompted Blizzard Entertainment to issue an official statement on the tech support forums after identifying the source of the problem.

Some players were blaming the StarCraft II Beta client's latest patch, but a Blizzard Tech Support representative quickly explained the issue is caused by the latest NVIDIA 196.75 drivers.

Blizzard recommended to uninstall the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers, and to downgrade to the previous driver version: 196.21. Starcraft II Beta is not the only application affected, thus this is a worldwide alert to every gamer out there. Blizzard concluded the fans control in this NVIDIA driver is not working properly.

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.
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I'll say it first to lighten the blow:

"And people say ATi drivers are bad?" :p

A surprising issue considering Nvidia's decent driver history.
 
Idling at 88C on a cool California day....:mad:

I tried setting the fan to 100% for five minutes and temps dropped to only 75C. Reverting to older drivers dropped the temperature back to 52C with the fan at only 40%.
 
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Honestly not having this problem. Played Bad Company 2 for 4 hours last night. What is happening? Is it not turning up the fan speed?



:confused:
 
Dethred said:
I'll say it first to lighten the blow:

"And people say ATi drivers are bad?" :p

A surprising issue considering Nvidia's decent driver history.
Click to expand...

Yep, I hate ATI drivers, and now it appears Nvidia doesn't even bother to test theirs.
Great.
 
SnowBeast said:
Honestly not having this problem. Played Bad Company 2 for 4 hours last night. What is happening? Is it not turning up the fan speed?



:confused:
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do you control your fan speed via a 3rd party program, like speedfan or rivatuner? can everest control fan speed?
 
It killed my 8800GTS I was using in my secondary machine here at work. Friggin sucks, the card was perfect for messing around here. I pulled the card out before I read all of this about the drivers and it was so hot it almost burned me.
 
SnowBeast said:
Honestly not having this problem. Played Bad Company 2 for 4 hours last night. What is happening? Is it not turning up the fan speed?



:confused:
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I think that my temperature was being misreported. I also played BC2 last night for many hours and didn't have a problem. I think the temperature reading for me is about 30C off OR somehow my card was massively overclocked.
 
Thanks, I'm going to uninstall tonight. BC2 was getting hot, hot, hot
 
No issues for me. And I spent all last night stress testing the CPU, RAM and video cards in the new rig.
 
more killer drivers from Nvidia.. crazy. well.. as with the others.. ymmv I am sure..
 
God damnit, if this is true I'm putting the drivers that came on the CD and never upgrading Nvidia drivers again. Isn't this the second time this has happend if true? Do they test these drivers for more than 5 minutes before They release them?
 
I installed these drivers yesterday and everything ran fine. Then I got up this morning, and my card's idle temp was around 70°C when it normally idles around 48°C. Needless to say, I uninstalled quickly.

C'mon nVidia, it's time you get your act together.
 
Nvidia is trying to generate some sales of their rebranded video cards with drivers that burn up your old card :D
 
'lol' at those guys who haven't learned their lesson. Again.

Stick with 182.50 and be happy.

The newer drivers will only bring problems since Nvidia is squarely focused on Fermi.


How many times does this need to be said? :eek:
 
My cards are running fine but then again I have my fan speeds set to 61%.
 
I installed these yesterday! Good thing I have a passive cooler on my 8800gt. :D
 
My card is now running at 60 degrees idle, before I installed these drivers it was 40 degrees. Uninstalling now...
 
spine said:
'lol' at those guys who haven't learned their lesson. Again.

Stick with 182.50 and be happy.

The newer drivers will only bring problems since Nvidia is squarely focused on Fermi.


How many times does this need to be said? :eek:
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I stick with either 186 WHQL or 190.62 WHQL for my systems.

Oh and never be the first to try out new drivers...let someone else take the fall.
 
panhead said:
Nvidia is trying to generate some sales of their rebranded video cards with drivers that burn up your old card
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That's what I was thinking lol. Except for this to be true they would have to deny the issue and leave the drivers up.
 
Well what really sucks is that FSAA has been fixed in these drivers for Mass Effect 2. I have an evga card and they provide a proggie (EVGA Precision) for fan control and temp monitoring. Works like a champ.
 
Took a bit of troubleshooting to realise it but yes I had the same issue with 196.75, The scary part is I just happen to be playing Crysis a lot lately and the card was running at 90C which started causing erratic framerates and long pauses, reverting back to 196.21 fixed it... Nice one Nvidia.
 
Ya I see this message on the driver download page:

196.75issues.JPG
 
Smooth move nvidia. Say what you will about ATI drivers but this is the second set of drivers causing hardware failure from nvidia in a pretty short time.
 
My GTX 280 SLI setup appeared unaffected by these drivers; nonetheless, I reverted back to the last WHQL to be safe. On the other hand, my brother's setup, SLI GTX 275s, were idling at 72c with these drivers and crashing in game after a few minutes. Doesn't look like he damaged his cards, thankfully, but I suggest you guys heed the warning -- seems these drivers really are borked.
 
I just wanted to add that the overheating seems to be more than just fan speed issues, I say this because even with my GTX260's fan speed manually set at 100% (You could clearly hear it spinning louder when adjusting so it was definitely at 100%!) my GPU IDLE temp was still higher than normal (65C) even after letting it idle for 10 minutes.

After reverting to 196.21 the idle temp dropped to 50C within 2 minutes.
 
Can someone recommend a good alternative driver for a 295 for Bad Company 2?

Thanks,
 
I'm worried now, i just sold a laptop with a 8600m gt and i think i put 196.75 on it (just got the latest off nvidia site) , dont want it to die within a few days...
 
e-geek said:
I'm worried now, i just sold a laptop with a 8600m gt and i think i put 196.75 on it (just got the latest off nvidia site) , dont want it to die within a few days...
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email / contact the buy and tell him/her about this issue.
 
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