196.75 Driver causes massive overheat
According to Blizzard's Tech Support the latest NVIDIA drivers are causing fan control to not work correctly and causes massive overheat. StarCraft II Beta might kill your PC or card literally. So, 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.
We're getting reports where users are getting intermittent low FPS after installing these drivers. 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.IncGamers reached NVIDIA's PR for an official statement and they replied:
Windows XP: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_196.21_whql.html
Windows XP 64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_196.21_whql.html
Windows Vista/7 32-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_32bit_196.21_whql.html
Windows Vista/7 64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_64bit_196.21_whql.html
More information can be found on threads such as these:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161525
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161503
One of these gamers reported insane egg-cooking temperatures as high as 104'C. Among the complaints found in the Starcraft II Beta forums are the following: 'General ScreenshotMy GPU is going almost 100% usage and my temperatures are at 104'C, 1C below max. I'm wondering if it's because StarCraft 2 beta REALLY is a demanding game, or if it's overusing my GPU . Fans are always @ 100% and side case is off. My normal temps for (halo, mw2, oblivion are 80-90C.) in Window mode or fullscreen, doesn't matter. - Velakan.velakan'
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.
