Nvidia warns of overheating graphics drivers
Faulty 196.75 drivers causes GeForce cards to overheat
By Agam Shah | Published: 09:54, 18 March 2010
Nvidia asked customers to remove drivers that caused its GeForce graphics cards to overheat, which ultimately crashed some PCs.
Nvidia acknowledged on its support site that customers had problems with the 196.75 package of GeForce drivers. Nvidia is asking customers to remove the faulty driver package and upgrade to the latest package, which is 197.13.
"Nvidia is aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues after installing 196.75 drivers from Nvidia's website. Nvidia has removed these drivers and asked its partners to also remove the drivers," Nvidia wrote on another support site.
As an alternative, customers could roll back to the older versions of graphics drivers, Nvidia said. "In almost every case reverting back to our 196.21 driver immediately resolved their issues," Nvidia wrote.
The GPU drivers need to be changed for the Windows 7, Vista and XP operating systems. The fix applies to the GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, and 300 series desktop GPUs and Ion desktop GPUs.
Customers on an Nvidia forum reported system crashes due to overheating of graphics cards. On another Nvidia forum, users reported that automatic fan speed control would not work and Windows would hang when they played games.
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