New video card drivers are killing cards

PC News | A warning to Nvidia users.

A few days ago, Graphic Card manufacturer Nvidia released a new set of drivers for their gaming cards, release 196.75. Performance increases were supposedly high, so many gamers downloaded away. However, reports have surfaced that the new drivers are indeed killing cards.

The reports started with beta testers for Starcraft 2, who reported total hardware failures at points, to which Blizzard quickly nailed down the problem to Nvidia's new drivers. Problems in other games began to surface, and in a swift move, Nvidia removed the drivers for download on their main webpage, aware of the problem.

"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."

So as a warning to all PC gamers with Nvidia cards, roll back to your older drivers if you have the new ones, lest you risk dishing out the money for a new card.

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7 Comments

Jarrod

1 year ago

I was literaly just about to download them. I owe you a beer.

EDIT: Oh it appears I wouldnt have been able to. Good! BEER REVOKED.

trixSTAR

1 year ago

Nothing new here then, Nvidia have dropped the ball. The Win7 drivers they initially released caused my desktop to go to crap and I had to download a special build to suite my monitor

mantra79

1 year ago

What would happen if it did kill your card, wouldnt nvidea have to replace it?

inigel

1 year ago

>nvidia
>drivers

Pick one.

jiayijames

1 year ago

For me never used a Nvidia card, always used Radeon. But that's not to say Ati drivers have no problems. Just feel Nvidia don't offer value for money.

Puddingfork

1 year ago

I've used both and I don't give a **** about drivers, they're pretty much the same* and this sort of thing is rare and could just as easily happen to ATI.

Value for money should be based almost entirely on their performance, and by which I don't mean specs, but frame rates graphs and what not from how they actually perform in games.

I think a couple years ago with the 4000 series ATI was best bang for the buck quite easily. Currently with the 200 vs 5000 series things are pretty much even, but give it another month or two and the 300 series will be out which from what I can tell will **** all over the 5000 series.

*With the exception of NVidia having PhysX, so driver wise things are in their favour slightly imo

mikezilla2

1 year ago

on a side not im on XP pro and i havent been able to find a stable set of drivers for my 8800 gts past 182 . just makes me wonder what il need to do when i upgrade to WIN 7 .

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