As many of you are aware, NVIDIA has hit some snags with their latest round of WHQL drivers. The drivers have been interfering with the fan operation on certain NVIDIA video cards, resulting in the GPU overheating. NVIDIA has taken down the drivers in question, and has asked that we pass along the following message:
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.
Here’s a link for instructions on how to roll back your driver. http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_rollback.html
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
pedrovmax - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
Now, I know why my 9800gx2 died!!!! Damm. Never more recent drivers... it can kill your hardware :(wmciii - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
Killed one of my 8800 GT's with this driver. BFG granted an RMA. This is a very serious bug. I WILL think twice before buying my next video card(s).bullseyes - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
My 8800GT got fried indeed (I had the 196.75 driver installed)... The computer froze while I was playing and I never thought that it will be the end of card. I did a hard reset an this is what I found:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAjUmYvcsJ4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAjUmYvcsJ4
After trying everything: drivers, system restore, testing the card on 2 other computers with the same result, video bios flash... I was going to throw the card away and getting a new one (Probably an HD 4890).
But I found out through forums of a last hope: BAKING THE CARD. Yes, that, baking the card for 10 min. in the oven, let it cool, reasambled it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDB8L31yb_4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDB8L31yb_4
This is the result:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ncA_MzYIcc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ncA_MzYIcc
Crazy! It works!
However I'm having some issues with high demanding games that I usually played whithout any trouble... This is the end of my relationship with any nVidia hardware, I'll never buy any device from them. I wasn't a fanboy, I never liked to be one, I pick my hardware researching to try to know what is the best for my everytime, and I don't mind going from ATI to NVIDIA. I've used them both, but this one is the last one to the green ones... They've forced me to become an ATI fanboy. What they did releasing this "whql" driver is a hughe irresponsability, non acceptable at all.
Sorry about my english, greetings from Argentina.
NT78stonewobble - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
I've been setting fanspeed manually for a long time.I haven't heard an nvidia card auto spin up since before the 8800 gts 320 mb I owned other than at bootup.
So thats... hmmm back to the ti4200 I owned :o
Ahnilated - Monday, March 8, 2010 - link
I tried 196.21 and you can't overclock your video card, 196.34 causes BSOD's. 196.75 causes fried video cards, which I am glad I didn't try. I think the whole 196 series should be bypassed.AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
196.34 works perfectly on my GTX260, WinXP.jeremyshaw - Monday, March 8, 2010 - link
You mean, rename them into the 197 series :p?ARoyalF - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
Don't give them any ideas! SheeshAhnilated - Monday, March 8, 2010 - link
I wouldn't put it past Nvidia being they have rebadged the 9800 now, 2 or 3 times.Holler - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
you mean rebadged the 8800 GT 3 or 4 times ;)