NVIDIA 196.75 kills video cards, page 1

Anyone who has installed the latest 196.75 Nvidia drivers are well advised to uninstall them immediately if they don't want their graphics card and possibly their PC going up in smoke. The drivers have now been pulled from Nvidia's website.

Several StarCraft II beta testers have reported their PC or video cards have died after installing the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers. The large amount of reports have prompted Blizzard Entertainment to issue an official statement on the tech support forums after identifying the source of the problem.

Some players were blaming the StarCraft II Beta client's latest patch, but a Blizzard Tech Support representative quickly explained the issue is caused by the latest NVIDIA 196.75 drivers.

Blizzard recommended to uninstall the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers, and to downgrade to the previous driver version: 196.21. Starcraft II Beta is not the only application affected, thus this is a worldwide alert to every gamer out there. Blizzard concluded the fans control in this NVIDIA driver is not working properly.

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.

Some EVGA enthusiasts have been able to manually change the GPU fans speed settings using the EVGA Precision Tool to run their fans at 77% speed to compensate.

www.incgamers.com...
forums.nvidia.com...
forums.nvidia.com...

I think Nvidia needs to spend more time testing it's drivers or it's going to have a lot of disgruntled customers.

[edit on 6-3-2010 by kindred]