WARNING - Nvidia 196.75 drivers can fry your graphics card

[capthelm]

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]

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/n...-graphics-car/

[Nordmann]

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]

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..)

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.

[Kresge]

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]

Originally Posted by Barso

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]

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]

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]

You really need to diable integrated graphics in BIOS.

[SabreHawk]

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]

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.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Fozzy22

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.

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]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

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]

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