WARNING - Nvidia 196.75 drivers can fry your graphics card [Archive]

Barso

03-05-10, 05:33 AM

If you are using the very latest nvidea drivers, STOP.
They have been pulled from their site as they seem to be causing GPU fans to not ramp up when needed causing GPU's to overheat and maybe fail.
Rollback to the last 196 drivers until the new ones are fixed.

Yskonyn

03-05-10, 05:38 AM

Thanks for the heads-up. Nobody wants to fry their card. :)

Decoman

03-05-10, 05:50 AM

Speaking of drivers, I will probably stick with my Ati Catalyst 9.11 drivers until I see some drivers from 2010 that has something to do with Silent Hunter 5.

9.11 drivers = november 2009
10.3 drivers = march 2010

Kromus

03-05-10, 06:01 AM

Thx for this info Barso! This is still last year for my 280GTX anyway but I don`t want to do an earlier upgrade :O:

Iliaz

03-05-10, 06:15 AM

Thanks for the Heads-Up, Barso! :up:

Dronston

03-05-10, 06:25 AM

Ragtag

03-05-10, 06:28 AM

It seems to affect these cards:

GeForce 9800GT, 9800GTX and GTS 250. May affect others to.

Source: http://www.geeks3d.com/20100305/forceware-196-75-can-kill-your-geforce-card/

The drivers works fine with my GTX285.

Dronston

03-05-10, 06:34 AM

So 196.75 is okay?

Okay, my version is the bad one. Rolling back as we speak!
Thanks for the heads up!

Dimitrius07

03-05-10, 06:36 AM

Arclight

03-05-10, 08:06 AM

Good thing I let Rivatuner control the fan. :lol:

McHibbins

03-05-10, 08:34 AM

Okay, my version is the bad one. Rolling back as we speak!
Thanks for the heads up!

So 196.21 will work ?

Dronston

03-05-10, 08:38 AM

So 196.21 will work ?

It seems so, it's the latest version listed on the nvidia site. 75 is indeed no langer available for download.
Just installed and everything seems to be normal.

Rothwell white

03-05-10, 08:41 AM

Thanks for info :salute:

malkuth74

03-05-10, 08:50 AM

Wow thanks I have a Gforc 260 and never noticed anything. But I went to the 196.34 drivers.

These will bring the Shadow slowdown worse though... So remember to just shut the shadows off.. I already did anyway.

But I mean quality control has gone to the crapper with computer companies lately.

I hope they are responsible for replacing people burned out cards? Lucky it was not mine becuase... Well I have ways.... :rotfl2:

AVGWarhawk

03-05-10, 09:22 AM

Bump and thanks! I have the 9800. Nice way to generate some business for Nvida. Plant a bad driver. :hmmm: Geez.

196.75 is the bad driver...currently the Nvida site shows 196.21 as the driver to use.

malkuth74

03-05-10, 09:33 AM

Yeah but that driver is bugged too, you can't overclock your GPU with that driver. The .35 driver is the same driver with that bug fixed. :cool:

guynoir

03-05-10, 09:34 AM

Wow, I'm glad that I am so on top of driver updates that I managed to install 196.75 in the short time that it was up for download... :DL

Luckily, I haven't played anything on the computer since I'm consumed with Bad Company 2 on the 360, and, well, I'm still not buying SHV due to the OSP. :cry:

piri_reis

03-05-10, 09:39 AM

Thanks for the heads up! :up:
Going back to .34 driver.

Stuntie

03-05-10, 09:51 AM

Thanks and 'Phew'
Saw that the new drivers were available and downloaded them, but it was late so decided to install them today.
Don't think I'll bother now...

FiL

03-05-10, 11:10 AM

Thanks and 'Phew'
Saw that the new drivers were available and downloaded them, but it was late so decided to install them today.
Don't think I'll bother now...

Hello
Same here, thanks for telling us. ;)

Hanomag

03-05-10, 11:34 AM

Still running my ancient Nvidia drivers..oh well whatever works no? :arrgh!:

brandtryan

03-05-10, 12:59 PM

a thousands thanks for the hads up. And what timing, as i just finally got the cojones to overclock my 8800GT. Probably the only thing that saved me was following oclocking instuctions to change fan speed of GPU to manual at 100%.

Good grief that was close. Rolled back to older driver though that ended up being a bit of an issue. every time i would reboot win 7 would reinstall the driver i was trying to get rid of-- with no ability to cancel installation! Anyway--got it done and thx again!

Barso

03-05-10, 03:21 PM

I am running a GTX295 and the game runs fantastic with shadows off but as soon as they are on even at 50% the game loses the smoothness.
I take it this is a driver problem?

Sunfighter

03-05-10, 03:23 PM

I am running a GTX295 and the game runs fantastic with shadows off but as soon as they are on even at 50% the game loses the smoothness.
I take it this is a driver problem?

I doubt this game is coded to work with 2 video cards which is what the GTX295 basically is. So take your vspecs and half it, and then you got your real video card power for this game.

CCIP

03-05-10, 03:27 PM

It's a compatibility issue. While there may be an off-chance that having a different driver version would help, as far as I can tell the problem is common to all nvidia hardware. I hope it gets looked at for the next patch.

ATI cards do not have this problem and I run the shadows on full with no issues.

Barso

03-05-10, 03:32 PM

Typical, freefalcon 5.3 won't work on nvidea GTX295 and now SH5 will not use the sli function. Typical. Hopefully nvidea will address it in next driver that isn't borked.
Great game anyway.

R-T-B

03-05-10, 03:40 PM

You can force the cards to use "AFR Mode 2" in the control panel and it works with everything but shadows. Just FYI.

Grey_Raven75

03-05-10, 03:43 PM

I'm running an NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GT and have no issues with the shadows maxed. Running DX11, driver version 196.21

Agustus

03-05-10, 03:48 PM

There's a major problem with the most recent nVidia driver with sub-par performance and overheating. In fact, it's destroyed several cards from overheating. Read about it here:

http://www.techspot.com/news/38131-nvidia-19675-gpu-driver-burning-up-graphics-cards.html

FIREWALL

03-05-10, 03:52 PM

This is bull... :yep: As I posted twice elsewhere I tested SH5 on an old rig with a Bfg7600GT 512mb card AGP and set SH5 Graphfics at medium. Latest drivers btw and...

Game played flawlessly.

capthelm

03-05-10, 05:52 PM

196.75 GeForce Alert!
We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.co.uk. Until we can verify the root cause for this issue, we recommend that customers stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. The 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website

mookiemookie

03-06-10, 08:57 AM

I know some people were saying that the new 196.75 drivers would help out FPS in SH5, but

It would seem StarCraft II Beta players were among the first to notice low frame rates while using the latest drivers from NVIDIA, and further digging has uncovered that the automated fan-controlling part of said firmware was failing to act as intended. The result? Overheated chips, diminished performance, and in some extreme cases, death (of the GPU, we think the users will be okay). The totality of it is that you should avoid the 196.75 iteration like the plague, and NVIDIA has temporarily yanked the update while investigating the reported issues.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/nvidia-pulls-196-75-driver-amid-reports-its-frying-graphics-car/

Nordmann

03-06-10, 09:05 AM

Those rumours are nothing new, they've been circulating since the 19x.x series was released. I don't know whether they are true or not, but I did have a GPU die on me before Christmas, and that was right after updating to the aforementioned drivers.

cappy70

03-06-10, 10:02 AM

I'm running the game now, just got it today and no problem what-so-ever with shadows and you see my rig specs. in the sign.

BTW,,thanks for heads up on drivers. Rolled back.

(Not doing a fanboy/card vs.card debate here, but ATI shouldn't mention to much about driver issues and SLI for example..:salute::D)

Barso

03-06-10, 10:20 AM

Kresge

03-06-10, 11:24 AM

From the Nvidia site itself:

"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 do not download this driver. Instead, please stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website and we also are asking our partners and others to remove temporarily this 196.75 WHQL driver as well."

cappy70

03-06-10, 04:31 PM

Cappy glad you have it running.
For some reason my GTS295 is having trouble with shadows.
I am running at 1920x1200 all setting max and on except for shadows.
At 50% and above I have framerate problem.
Hopefully a future driver will sort it.
I am running a corei7 920 at 3.6GHz, GTX295 no overclock, 12GB RAM and windows 7 ultimate 64bit.
All drivers up to date.

Ok,,I have one thing different: I'm running a tad lower resolution.

I think it is also driver vs. coding in the game issue, I don't think it is hardware related.

marcel1980

03-09-10, 08:29 AM

F*cking hell. Good that i red this forum. My game crashes sometime after installing the newest driver from nvidia. I have a gf 260. A table with nvidia driver error appears and then only thing i can do is hard reset

SabreHawk

03-09-10, 09:29 AM

Well apparently this was a bad move for me on this, I just did what was advised and installed these 196.21 from the 196.75 drivers I just updated to a few days ago.
Well somehow that caused my system to stop using my video card, and it reverted to the onboard graphics chip.(Geforce 9600GT, 512mb) And that wasnt working well at all I tell ya. In fact this forum wouldnt work right, could hardly scroll at all...........extremely sloooow.

So I had to do a system restore to get it working right again. Im sticking with these newer ones for now cause nothing was malfuntioning and SH5 was running just fine.
I thought something wasnt right as the system restarted after installing these older drivers and windows finished loading, the found new hardware wizard came up. Since I knew I hadnt installed anything I canceled that. and thats when I discovered that my 9600GT wasnt being used.

Arclight

03-09-10, 01:36 PM

You really need to diable integrated graphics in BIOS. :-?

SabreHawk

03-09-10, 03:33 PM

Well after much headache and two tech support calls to UBI it's all working again. But these .21 drivers aren't completely right either, as my system wont keep the settings when restarting. I have to go to video properties and reset it all after a restart.
But other than that the game is working again.
My advise now is, dont do this if your system is working fine as mine was.
Like nvidia said, "some" customers were reporting card failures with the .75 drivers. That some may have had bad cards to start with, or some other issue causing this.

Personally I dont think it had anything to do with the drivers.

Fozzy22

03-09-10, 03:57 PM

Thanks for the warning about this. I'm rolling back as i speak. I'm wondering if my game was crashing because of this or if my Core 2 Duo 6700 isn't powerful enough lol. :doh:

AVGWarhawk

03-09-10, 04:08 PM

Thanks for the warning about this. I'm rolling back as i speak. I'm wondering if my game was crashing because of this or if my Core 2 Duo 6700 isn't powerful enough lol. :doh:

I think you Duo is fine for the game. I will tell you my EVGA 9800 fan is running high when playing SH5. The game certainly works you hardware to the max! I did rollback when I read this. So yeah, roll back and see what happens.

Arclight

03-09-10, 04:27 PM

The game certainly works you hardware to the max!
It does? My old 8800 is barely heating up. Lot of resources going to waste if you ask me. :-?

remowilliams

03-09-10, 04:49 PM

I rolled back to the 196.21 drivers and had horrible issues with wave stuttering in the game. Went up to 196.34b and all was well again. Using GTX295 / Win7 x64 here

longam

03-09-10, 05:18 PM

Guess I better roll back... 196.75 here

Capt. Friedhoffer

03-10-10, 01:23 AM

A friend of mine has some older Dell rig that doesn't have a AGP slot nor a PCI Express port. He is stuck using a standard PCI slot instead. He found a card sold through Powercolor that is a ATI Radeon HD 2400, standard PCI form factor. I think it's 256MB. You think with this card it will be possible to play Silent Hunter 5? You guys are so knowledgeable, I thought I would ask for him here. I have a 2600 PCI-e myself so I don't see that big of a difference, is there? Thanks in advance for any assistance you folks can provide.

SabreHawk

03-10-10, 01:28 AM

Well I tell ya what, im having nothing but trouble since going to this 196.21 driver, and now because they pulled the .75 driver I cant get it back.

I've tried rolling it back but that just gets me the 178. something that was too old for SH5 to run on, thats why I updated to the 196.75 in the first place and SH5 was working perfectly then, as was my computer. But now if I do a reboot the system is lucky if it can get windows loaded with iout the video driver getting into an infinite loop and wont allow the reboot to finish. It did this two times this evening and i thought it wasnt gonna come back at all for a while.
Earlier this evening SH5 did something I hadn't seen it do, the screen went black, and then after several min. I got a message from windows that the driver failed.

Wow, my computer has never done this, ever.
Also upon a successful reboot, the video reverts to the highest possible resoloution, and I have to reset it back to 1024x768 again. And I cant access the advanced panel from the card's properties window, that too has never happened. And it seems that the Nvidia Nview software is no longer there.

Edit: Ok I got things back, I found the 196.75 drivers and run the installer and now Nview is back and all seems healthy again. Now to see if SH5 can run healthy again too.