NVIDIA ForceWare 196.75 roasting GPUs

Robert Hallock 5 Mar, 2010 at 10:22am ET Article published in Tech

Emerging reports confirm that recent NVIDIA GPU driver 196.75 contains a bug that is responsible for killing a number of GPUs.

The issue came to light yesterday when scattered reports from users of the StarCraft II beta alleged that the new driver was not correctly triggering a high-RPM fan state when a Blizzard title placed a 3D load on the GPU, leading cards to overheat and die.

“I want to warn all of our visitors who are participating in the StarCraft II Beta to refrain from installing the latest NVIDIA WHQL 196.75 WHQL-certified drivers,” wrote IncGamers on March 4. “If you already installed it, uninstall it and downgrade to the previous version. Yeah, it’s that serious. Many players are reporting their PCs or graphic card have died. It also affects all Blizzard games, so heed the call and safe your hardware’s life.”

After investigating reports that the new StarCraft II client patch was responsible for the sudden rash of GPU deaths, Blizzard announced that the new 196.75 ForceWare was to blame.

“We’re getting reports where users are getting intermittent low FPS after installing these drivers,” wrote Blizzard Tech Support representative Datth. “It seems that it is related to the fan control included in these drivers not working correctly and is causing the video card to overheat on 3D applications. This will affect Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 Beta. Please uninstall the drivers and revert back to the older ones.”

In response to the outcry, and upon internal investigations, NVIDIA has removed the 196.75 driver from its site and warned users to roll back to an earlier version.

“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,” said NVIDIA rep Bryan Del Rizzo.

Users running this affected GPU driver are advised to roll back to version 196.21 immediately to protect their GPU.

ForceWare 196.21 download

Comments

5 Mar 2010 ~ 10:51am mirage Love fried chips

I checked the fan speed on my 260GTX (OC 725/1200) while running Furmark. 196.75 is running fine and scaling the fan speed exactly as I programmed in Rivatuner. So, no worries for Rivatuner users.
5 Mar 2010 ~ 10:53am photodude I wonder if this driver issue also effects the QuadroFX line of cards....
5 Mar 2010 ~ 10:58am photodude looks like it does effect the QuadroFX line too. Nvidia pulled the new driver and rolled back to 191.87 WHQL
5 Mar 2010 ~ 11:05am mirage You can try Rivatuner. Here is how I did (last two posts).
5 Mar 2010 ~ 2:19pm DrLiam Wonder if these users will get compensated for their fried GPU.
5 Mar 2010 ~ 2:22pm mirage Maybe a 6-pack ketchup?
7 Mar 2010 ~ 5:32pm ardichoke Oh boy. Another reason for me to be happy that I jumped ship and bought a Radeon 5770 a couple weeks ago.
7 Mar 2010 ~ 6:39pm Snarkasm Let's not pretend like ATI's drivers are all sunshine and roses. They're not ruining hardware, but they're plenty shitty all the same. I'm pretty disappointed with both companies lately.
7 Mar 2010 ~ 7:20pm clifford_cooley

DrLiam wrote:

Wonder if these users will get compensated for their fried GPU.

I would be curious to know if any of the roasted GPU's were not OC'd. This would fall back to the term "OC at your own risk". It would also give the company a loop hole to fall in and avoid replacing the cards. I know this is a shitty way to do business but you know how companies are.