Nvidia 191.07 drivers causing outright hardware failure?

Hmmm this is interesting. I have a 260 and everything was fine up until the release before 191. The weird thing is that the card works cool on any game that's pre Direct x9. Anything that's a recent game like DA which is built with DirectX 9/10 features causes the card to overheat. I have a Nforce4 MB as well. So I'm quite intrigued with this post. Thank you for posting this thread. My card might be dying but at least this gives me some things to think about.
 
this is very interesting. i recently updated to the 195.xx series drivers (whql and beta versions), and i had nothing but game crashes and bsod's in windows. i rolled back to the 191.07 whql and everything has worked perfectly. no bsod's, no game crashes.
 
Anyone with Windows 7 roll back to the 186's? I read that Windows 7 doesn't like those drivers, but the earliest official drivers supporting 7 were the 185.85's...only reason I'm asking is because I had crashes with the 191's and the 186's were really popular. I think they were the ones where nVidia boosted the performance of the GTX 260 to better compete with the Radeon 4870.
 
Just wanted to thank eVGA for RMAing my 9800 GX2. Now With the GTX 285 replacement and 186 nvidia drivers, my PC has not had a single crash or video error!!!

I will probably skip the 19x. generation of drivers to avoid any issues :)
 
imyourzero said:
Anyone with Windows 7 roll back to the 186's? I read that Windows 7 doesn't like those drivers, but the earliest official drivers supporting 7 were the 185.85's...only reason I'm asking is because I had crashes with the 191's and the 186's were really popular. I think they were the ones where nVidia boosted the performance of the GTX 260 to better compete with the Radeon 4870.
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I'm using 182.50 on win7.
 
headless said:
I'm using 182.50 on win7.
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Thanks. Problems with any games?

I believe I found a forum thread for every set of drivers nVidia has made, claiming that they are the best and most stable. Sigh. It's a shame that it's not a universal rule of thumb to always go with the latest set, as with other hardware. New driver sets often introduce problems and you end up having to download and test different versions on your own setup to determine which is best. It's a pain! But I love PC gaming nonetheless...
 
OK, just found something odd. A post on the nvidia forums mentioned disabling automatic time update (Windows Time service) to fix the problem. I can't imagine why this would have any effect in the slightest, but since disabling that service I haven't had a single crash. Before, my system was hard locking every 5-10 minutes while gaming. I had the same symptoms as everyone here. Went to latest drivers, 8800GTX that has been rock stable for 2 years suddenly worthless, crashing/locking all the time.

I still have a hard time believing this is a possible fix, but I haven't been able to make it crash since. Mass Effect wouldn't even make 5 min before, but I played for over an hour last night. And this was with the latest WHQL drivers. Also spent all day Sunday playing MW2 in a 30C house, and it was perfect.

I almost want it crash, because there's no way w32time should cause any problems like this, and I hate fixes that make no sense. :)
 
imyourzero said:
Thanks. Problems with any games?

I believe I found a forum thread for every set of drivers nVidia has made, claiming that they are the best and most stable. Sigh. It's a shame that it's not a universal rule of thumb to always go with the latest set, as with other hardware. New driver sets often introduce problems and you end up having to download and test different versions on your own setup to determine which is best. It's a pain! But I love PC gaming nonetheless...
Click to expand...

Well, i don't play a whole lot of the newest games these days I suppose, but I haven't had any problems with batman:AA, tf2, l4d, l4d2, supreme commander, quake3, rome: total war, empire: total war at least....

I feel your pain; i used to always get the newest drivers every time i'd install, and upgrade every month or 2...lately, i've been happy to find a set that's table with my current setup, then stick with them until lack of support on a new gam forces me to update.
 
I recently upgraded to the lastest Nvidia Drivers (195) and my system would crash while playing MW2 at random times. Was definately vid card failure judging from the artifacts on the screen. Went back to the 188's and haven't seen the problem since. I was able to minimize the game once (instead of a hard reset) and it was a vid card infinite loop error.... at least that's what Windows was reporting.
 
Yeah I didn't have any problems whatsoever on the 19x.xx drivers. In fact, some framerate issues I had in WoW were gone when I was using them. For those who know what I'm talking about, there used to be a massive framerate drop on Skadi in UP when his drake creates that fog on the ground with maxed settings.

Rolling back to 186.18 just to be safe, those framerate drop issues have returned so now I leave my shadow quality down a notch. Better safe than sorry though.
 
in wow i have found that the 1st setting of shadows works just fine and is a great fps improvement over high quality shadows
 
I was running on the 191.07 drivers since they came out and most games ran fine, including DA. I did notice some artifacts on floor boards after I updated to the 195.xx drivers though. This didn't last too long though as my card died the next day. :D
 
Ok, I am ordering a new PSU soon (still need to get the $$$). I admit that I do not know too much about PSU's other than "what I need". I have the 700w OCZ GameXStream PSU. It has 4x12v rails at 18A each, combined 72A. After reading some pages about PSU's I take it that 1+1=2. So two 18A rails is 36A. And I know it's not 36A all the time, so take a little.

So when I see "combined 12V current rating of xxA or more" do I look for JUST the two going to the card (would make sense..) or combined for all rails in the PSU (ones going to the CPU and such)?

Here is the PSU I ordered: Super Flower 1000w

And now a PSU/vid card (buyer backed out) are gonna go up for sale :p.
 
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2 days ago I installed the beta drivers from Nvidia's website because I read that theyfixed the issues causing King's Bounty to not work.. Immediate failure upon game launch of my 9800GTX+. Snowy artifacts.. reproducable. I rolled back immediately. These were 195.81 betas.
 
I installed the 191.07 drivers when I did my Win 7 x64 install in late October and they ran fine. No artifacts, good frame rates on my GTX 280.

I read this thread a couple of weeks ago (early January) and updated to the 195.62 drivers and had 2 blue screens in less than a week caused by the video drivers.

Went back to the 191.07 and all if well again. I guess YMMV on these drivers.
 
Another $220 down the drain. Well $700 total on trying to figure out this problem. After this project gonna reinstall the OS.
 
191.07 was nothing but crashes for me in most of my games. I think I am back to 185.something or other and stable as a rock in every game. Haven't bought any new games since batman so no need for me to upgrade drivers I suppose. Once MW2 gets to a more reasonable 39 or 49 bucks then I will buy it but not until.
 
Astrodave said:
191.07 was nothing but crashes for me in most of my games. I think I am back to 185.something or other and stable as a rock in every game. Haven't bought any new games since batman so no need for me to upgrade drivers I suppose. Once MW2 gets to a more reasonable 39 or 49 bucks then I will buy it but not until.
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What kind of crashes were you getting? Video driver not responding, or hard system lock with screen corruption?
 
My 8800GT also went teets up after I installed 191.07. 2d apps work fine. When trying to play a game, I get rainbow crap on the screen along with a hard-lockup... usually within 1-5 minutes of loading the game.

I have 3 video cards in my system. The 8800GT, a 7800 and an 8400GS PCI. I have found that if I pull the 7800 and 8400, I can run 3d games with the 8800. But if I have more than 1 video card installed, the 8800GT will do the rainbow lockup thing.

I tried rolling back to older driver versions, even deleting the registry keys mentioned in this post, and still the 8800 locks up in 3d apps.

My ATI 5870 is arriving today to replace it. I hope that its just the 8800 that is fried and not my motherboard (Asus P5K Deluxe).

Thanks Nvidia,
 
peakejef said:
Here is a person that fixed the problem by putting his 8800Ultra in the oven:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=156567&view=findpost&p=982989
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Huge thread on it here with many success stories: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792

This is all do to the shoddy solder used in the 8800 series cards. You melt it again at high temps in the oven, it seals the micro fissures, and the card works again. Once the micro fissures form again, you repeat.
 
Update: Didn't reinstall my OS yet (projects need to be done before). But I got a tip from someone to turn Aero on. I've been running with Aero, and have not had an error in 3 days.

Now because I mentioned that I haven't had any problems, I'm gonna get a ton of them tonight.
 
MrChicken said:
I've been having screen freeze issues since I built this PC last month. They've been getting more frequent and they used to only be in-game. Now I'm getting them in Win7. Actually happened today as I was on nvidia's site serching for old drivers.

No errors, just frozen on the screen like a picture, only way out is to power cycle.
EVGA GTX-275 running the 19x drivers since the build.

Just grabbed the 186's, I hope I'm not too late...
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Update:
Rolling back the drivers reduced the frequency of the freeze issue by about 80%, but did not eliminate it. Manually setting the fan speed to 60% on the 275 seemed to help in game play but didnt completely eliminate it either.

Being bored one day I was playing in MB bios and decided to try overclocking the system, told the BIOS OC tool to have it and it ran and tested and set the OC, 3.22 from 2.8 for cpu and it bumped the memory up to 1600 from 1300 (it's rated at 1600 but the bios always set it at 1300).
Since then no freezes in the last 3 weeks, I have the fan on the 275 set back to default, 40%-auto.

I might try the new drivers this weekeend.

MB is an Asus P7P55D Pro with 8GB of Corsair XMS3 memory, I now think memory timing may have been the problem all along.
 
Don't be surprised if your card needs an RMA.

My GTX 285 broke early November, and I can't remember which drivers I was using. Anyway, I started a game and crashed back to the desktop, without aero.

Whenever I ran aero, or a game, or hw accelerated video, I would get a black screen/crash/artifacts.

However, without aero on, and uninstalling the drivers, the card ran fine in 2D mode for over a whole month. Seems like the logic with the 3D mode, if possible, got fried/overheated.

Now I'm rock solid with 196 drivers and a new RMA GTX 285 (minus the s-video port, apparently they removed that from all XFX reference designs? :\)
 
Did a bunch of stress-tests this weekend, and went back to my "pre-crashing all the damn time" workflow:
  • Running Photoshop with a 2.7GB GeoTiff
  • GlobalMapper is running with a terrain database going
  • Maya is open.
  • Lightwave is open.
  • ZBrush is open.
  • Artrage is open.
  • xNormal is crunching.
  • UDK is running with the occasional "play in editor" mode.
I am still a little pissed that all I had to do was turn Aero ON (and save some cash), but (very) happy that I don't have to tip-toe around my computer.

The End...?
 
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