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
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rdh - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Really? Is that what Nvidia have done with thousands... maybe tens of thousands... of Nvidia cards on notebook/laptop motherboards? (NO). They agreed to pay money, but not to those who suffer from their mistakes. No, they pay fines to the MANUFACTURERS (Hewlett Packard), who then turn around and charge $399 to fix the laptop with the bogus Nvidia chip.Nvidia is LESS than honorable when it comes to making good on their mistakes.
RealTheXev - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
[quote]how are the nvidia fanboys going to spin this? [/quote]Apparently they're not spinning. lol
kyp275 - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
you won the internet!hwhacker - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
^ Winner!Leyawiin - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
Probably the same way ATI fanboys will jump on it, with all fours and lots of hyperbolegabbadoo - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
Dunno :D Perhaps they have a problem with the temperatures on the new series, for which the 196.75 drivers include support (if they do). Maybe they want us to (I'm a fanboy too) think the new series won't make much noise, that it will be very low audible at idle/2D, which has made the driver-fan-controller set the fan speed / voltage too low for the fans to start up at all...Alexvrb - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
Yeah except the drivers don't run the same exact code for all their cards. That includes things like fan control. So basically its a nasty bug, and nothing more. What causes the bug to crop up is the big question. The only person I know that was having major overheating problems with this driver (196.75) was someone that used a modified BIOS to overclock and override fan control.Funny enough, the 196.21 WHQL drivers are what pushed them to do this, since they fixed lots of issues but they also disabled software overclocking. Lots of Nvidia driver issues lately, especially for WHQL releases, which are typically very solid.
hwhacker - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
1. It's my understanding this messed up the AUTO fan setting functionality. I would guess if this had to happen, it will effect a smaller amount of people because the group that grabs a new driver as soon as it's launched is also the least likely to keep the fan on auto.2. nVIDIA PR now needs to STFU with the slandering in every possible place about AMD's grey-screen issues. A grey screen causes a reboot, a fried card causes an RMA, unless it's no longer under warranty, in which the customer is SOL. Which is a more gigantic fail?
That is all.
jdcope - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
Could be worse than that...I am pretty sure their warranty states that Nvidia is not responsible for damage from a driver update.michal1980 - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
Easy:nvidia needs to sell new cards so they burn out the old ones.
oh wait.