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Nvidia 196.75 drivers causing graphics cards to die
- binarymax 17y agoThank you! I literally JUST BOUGHT a machine with no O/S and a GTS250 and was about to install the O/S along with those drivers that I had already downloaded. What are the chances I saw this article just in time?
- dirtbox 17y agoExactly this has happened to me early this week with a 9800GTX+ (for some reason the drivers identify it as a 250GTS) except I was lucky enough to catch it before the GPU itself became damaged. I thought it was merely a broken fan, so went about ripping apart a case fan and McGyvering it onto the card. However I haven't played any of those games, or really done anything terribly intensive aside from Zbrush and Maya, so I'm uncertain if it's related or merely a coincidence. Although, to be fair, I've never had a fan of any description die. Does anyone know of some way to check or ultimately claim for this?
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago> 9800GTX+ (for some reason the drivers identify it as a 250GTS) It's because it's the exact same card. On most rebrands, at least they bother to change the relevant identifiers, but 9800GTX+ differs from a GTS250 only by the number on the box. As such, the drivers have no way of knowing which of them you have -- they cannot even make a solid guess from batch numbers because unsold 9800GTX+ were repackaged as GTS250's. Faced with this, the driver programmers decided that less people would probably complain if they just called all the cards by the latter name. Fun fact -- differently harvested versions of the G92 chip have been sold as: - GeForce 8800 GT $2 - GeForce 8800 GS $1 - GeForce 8800 GTS - GeForce 9600 GSO $1 - GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 $$ - GeForce 9800 GT $2 - GeForce 9800 GTX - GeForce 9800 GTX+ $3 - GeForce 9800 GX2 - GeForce GTS 150 - GeForce GTS 240 - GeForce GTS 250 $3 - GeForce GT 330 Groups marked with $n are all exactly the same card, with no differences whatsoever. Many other sets have only very minor differences. $$ denotes the biggest ripoff award -- halved memory bus width and cheap memory make this card only half the speed of the normal 9600 GSO. So, if you wonder why NVidia is swimming in cash, it's because G80, and it's slightly modified shrink G92, are insanely good designs. G80 debuted in late 2006 and G92 in late 2007, and it's still selling.
- dirtbox 17y agoWow. I really used to like Nvidia, but I'm leaning heavily towards an ATi on my next upgrade.
- Tuna-Fish 17y agoNot really a reason. Just stop using their marketing names, and refer to their chips by their chip names/harvest percentage/clockspeed/bus speeds. So, 9800GTX+ is a full G92 running at 738MHz with a 70.4 GB/s bus. See, easy! ;) Just to update -- if you are buying a card now, ATi is quite probably the better choice, at least until NVidia gets GF100 and it's derivatives out.
- dirtbox 17y ago
- gte910h 17y agoWow thanks, just upgraded to those. Now downgraded back to _21
- nitrogen 17y agoIt's not the first time something like this has happened. My brother got a 9800GX2 from EVGA, and due to inadequate fan settings programmed into the card's BIOS it overheated and destroyed the thermal interface between the GPU and heatsink (though the GPU didn't seem to be damaged -- the computer would boot and run for about 2 minutes from a cold start). After getting a replacement, he uses Rivatuner to force the fan to 100% when doing anything 3D. He still gets occasional frame rate drops on one of the two GPUs, though it claims its temperature is fine.
- ciupicri 17y agoOk, the driver was buggy, but why don't these cards have some kind of protection against overheating? If the temperature is too high they could downclock or even shutdown.