Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA Driver Update Causing Video Cards To Overheat In Games
After a group of StarCraft II beta testers reported technical difficulties following the installation of NVIDIA driver update 196.75, Blizzard tech support found that the update introduced fan control problems that were causing video cards to overheat in 3D applications. "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." NVIDIA said they were investigating the problem, took down links to the new drivers, and advised users to revert to 196.21 until the problem can be fixed.
This issue is related to automatic fan control not working due to improper registry keys, and so GPU's that run warm (9800 series for instance) can quickly overheat and potentially suffer damage. I'm having no issues with mine, but I set fan profiles manually as I'm using a machine that has a very hot MCH & fb-dimms (2008 Xeon) and don't want the gpu contributing more. However for anyone interested (and using a GT200 or at least G80/G92 on up) here's the fix: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161767
Hi,
Please do tell where I can get Far Cry 3....Unless bittorrent has seriously moved into time travel of course...
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Spot on. My 8600GT started overheating in my laptop and while it survived, my CPU was hitting 105C and would shut down randomly and required the processor, motherboard and many other components to be replaced (the heat ruined the life of the battery). The GPU was holding out at the temperatures fine but because of the heat pipe it was connected to, it was cooking the CPU in the process.