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NVIDIA Driver Update Causing Video Cards To Overheat In Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-thought-this-only-happened-to-ati dept.

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.

3 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Prototype, World of Warcraft, Farcry 3, Crysis

    One of these things is not like the others~

  2. Re:Processor damage, really? by mkairys · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Laptops for example generally have the same heat pipe connected to the CPU and GPU. If one overheats, so can the other.

  3. Re:Nvidia driver causing overheating? Oh really. by omglolbah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A game should not be able to cause an overheat in a card, ever.
    The card's firmware or hardware should throttle down before damage occurs.

    If not the design is broken. Simple as that.