Nvidia 191.07 drivers causing outright hardware failure?

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Chromatik

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These issues did not start until I installed the 191.07 WHQL drivers.

As it stands right now I can not play any games on my machine. 2D/ Desktop, basic applications work fine. When launching any games (Painkiller Black via Steam, UT3, Fallout 3 etc) and actually loading into them (ie loading a save or starting new) my machine will be ok for anywhere from 0 to 30 seconds and then it looks like high res rainbow colored bubble wrap across the screen. Hard boot is the only thing that will clear it.

I was running the Win 7 64 RTM at the time of update. I attempted to revert to the 186 drivers but the issue persisted. I then formatted and reinstalled XP Pro, thinking Win 7 drivers were just not mature enough and installed the 185 drivers for XP (I had decent luck with them in the past). I installed UT3 and found myself with the same issue. Different OS, clean format, Different drivers. I opened my case and notes all components were cool to the touch except my card (even the sound card two slots below is fine). All stickers on the card were bowed and coming off the card indicating the heat was excessive. I have had this card since Around Feb and have had zero issues until now.

At this point BFG has another GTX 280 OCX on the way as I thought maybe my card just happened to die. I plan on trying to reset CMOS and flash BIOS if needed to start from a clean slate. After reading the driver stopped working threads, and worst of all notes over on the EVGA forum stating this may have causes actual damage to the motherboard I am very worried the replacement card is not going to do the trick. Several posts mention a correlation between the NF200 chip on the mainboard and the 191.07 drivers.

Has anyone had any experiences with this or further insights, suggestions? My PSU (not mentioned in sig) is a PC P&C Silencer 750 Quad. All components are at stock as I never got around to OC'ing. The rest of my system specs are below. :(
 
Definitely sounds like a bad card to me and based on your description absolutely heat related. Most likely a failure on the card fan?
 
I'm having the same problems with my system now too.

It started with some random stuttering and pausing, then corruption along with the pausing and now things are just crashing. At first I thought something was overheating, or my power supply was dieing or something, but after reading that thread on EVGA forums I think these stupid drivers have ruined my board since the cards work fine on their own in another system and temps never went over 75c during any of this.

You have the same board I do so I'm curious if you can find anything to fix it. Unfortunately I bought mine open box from newegg so I doubt I can RMA with Asus, and man I'm going to be pissed if I have to buy another board because nVidia's drivers ruined mine :mad:
 
darkpaw said:
Definitely sounds like a bad card to me and based on your description absolutely heat related. Most likely a failure on the card fan?
Click to expand...

We'll see what happens when the RMA'd 280 gets here. The fan is still working and seems to be at normal speed (not slow rotating or anything).

Abit667 said:
You have the same board I do so I'm curious if you can find anything to fix it. Unfortunately I bought mine open box from newegg so I doubt I can RMA with Asus, and man I'm going to be pissed if I have to buy another board because nVidia's drivers ruined mine :mad:
Click to expand...

I really hope this is the card and not the board, but that is my worry. BFG support is awesome. Asus's is well... ask anyone here. I would expect to buy a new one vs get anything out of them. It is really shitty if a crap driver version killed my $400 P6T6 for gaming purposes. I didn't build this machine to play solitaire and I don;t have the money to be forking over fro random $400 components just to test things either.
 
I seriously doubt that a driver killed your video card. What I suggest is you either roll back to the previous driver or use Driver cleaner (follow instructions) and then reload the 191.07 driver. I have run the 191.07 driver on a SLi system since it has been out and have no issues.
I do make sure I have a complete uninstall of the previous verison prior to installing a newer version of dirvers. Even Nvidia will tell you to do that.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745
 
WildHawg said:
I seriously doubt that a driver killed your video card. What I suggest is you either roll back to the previous driver or use Driver cleaner (follow instructions) and then reload the 191.07 driver. I have run the 191.07 driver on a SLi system since it has been out and have no issues.
I do make sure I have a complete uninstall of the previous verison prior to installing a newer version of dirvers. Even Nvidia will tell you to do that.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745
Click to expand...

The problem is that what quite a few people have found now is that using these drivers on a board with an NF200 chip will degrade the board over a period of time until its almost unusable or has pcie lane failure. Moving the cards to another machine proves the cards work fine, the affected machine can be entirely formatted and reinstalled with older drivers and the problem remains.
 
I just got done flashing bios, clearing CMOS for kicks, then booting directly to Win 7 RTM for a clean format. After install of Win 7 I installed Nvidia 185 drivers and nothing else except UT3 (did not even patch)

Launched UT3 and the second it hit the main screen (a 3d rendered background) my machine locked with the rainbow mess again. No events were logged by windows other than starting up from an unexpected shutdown.

This is hardware that was fine up until the 191.07 drivers were installed.

My card is fucked, or my board is fucked, and I'm fucking pissed... :mad:
 
Updated to 191.07 after a gtx8800 died on me, using a gtx285 replacement. Worked for a few hours and started producing artifacts. After that got the problem many have... games freeze but you can alt tab out and back and they continue for a few mins til the next freeze.

Happening in Dragon Age, Borderlands etc.. Those forums are alive with the same issue. You can reinstal older drivers that previously worked but no joy... same problems (yes after driver sweeping).

This system was rock solid for 2 years previously with no graphical issues at all.

After days of attempted debugging I support the view that this driver causes either permanent or non driver related configuration issues which are not resolvable without a dedicated fix.

Im on Vista 64 with a BFG GTX285OCFU running 2.4Ghz Q6600 and 8Mb of memory.
 
same. my 9800gx2 was perfectly fine until 191... i am RMAing it and doing a clean install before putting in the replacement.
 
There are so few posts concerning this that it may just be coincidental failures. It's not like the Xbox 360 dashboard updates where the internet is awash with reports of mass brickings.

I'm still a bit worried to use those drivers though. At any rate, I've put in 50+ hours of dragon age on the 195 betas with no problems. Several 10 hour sessions with gtx280 sli running full blast, so if those were going to kill a card mine would be dead.
 
ouch, thats not good :(


what did you guys end up doing? This is the first I've heard about this
 
I've noticed since I installed win7 with these drives my game is having graphic issue's. I never had this issue with vista.
 
Are there perhaps newer beta drivers that are out that you can try?

Also what was your gpu temp?
 
Guys, google 191.70 driver problem. Its very widespread this issue... I emphsise the direct link with driver upgrade. Fine for 2 years previous.

Ive tried the new beta drivers... even worse then... i get rainbow artifacts, even in windows... same as many other people. Restoring old drivers gets rid of the artifacts, but the alt-tab issue remains in all games, even Fallen Earth which has run perfectly for me for months prior to driver upgrade.

WIll check GPU temps as many people report very high temps... guess this could be the result of a bad driver. Some suggest that the fan RPM gets locked low and it damages GPU components. Most reports seem to be on Nivida chipset motherboards though... cant see the connection myself.
 
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Im having this problems too with mw2

fans are still running just fine

only getting 52c under load

might turn the fan up on my 8800GT KO
 
So weird, damn, I'm about to get my 295 tomorrow and had these drivers downloaded and ready. So these drivers can mess up your system? That even possible?
 
i'm having this problem too. gives me quite a lower performance with my gts 250, by installing the 191.07 or the 195.39 drivers. some games just hang up or run slow.

have tried using drive cleaner and reinstalling
 
Well, after getting back my 8800GT it won't work on any driver other than the default 182.xx one that auto-installs with my win7 rc. Ah well, no big deal, gonna put win7 final or 2008 r2 in soon. If those lot still have issues though...
 
All I can say if my 295 don't work with these drivers, it's going back asap :D
 
I don't think I'm going to have issues with this driver. I guess it is an issue with the nf200 chipset. Googled and found this thread:

http://www.evga.com/forumsarchive/tm.asp?m=100961981&mpage=2&key=

People are rmaing their nvidia motherboards it seems due to the driver some how killing it due to higher voltages it would seem. This is why I don't go with nvidia chipset motherboards. My gigabyte with the g31 chipset has never given me issues, and has overclocked the quad very nicely to 3.8ghz on air.
 
PS3 said:
I don't think I'm going to have issues with this driver. I guess it is an issue with the nf200 chipset. Googled and found this thread:

http://www.evga.com/forumsarchive/tm.asp?m=100961981&mpage=2&key=

People are rmaing their nvidia motherboards it seems due to the driver some how killing it due to higher voltages it would seem. This is why I don't go with nvidia chipset motherboards. My gigabyte with the g31 chipset has never given me issues, and has overclocked the quad very nicely to 3.8ghz on air.
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Nice:cool:

I got a similar setup, with a 9800gx2 incomming.
 
PS3 said:
Should go good with your new case ;)
Click to expand...

CM 341 Elite!

I love this mATX case.

Tiny, yet very capable.


Any chance this wave of reported failures has to do with Hybrid Power and how it changes power management?
Or has HP been ditched / never updated?

just throwing the theory out there.
 
Could be since power management is controlled at the driver level...or is that just the fan speed...hmmm.... One thing is for sure, if your MB has an nvidia chipset, might want to stay away from the new drivers...perhaps until this is issue with the 191.07 drivers is addressed or a new driver version is released.
 
For those of you who don't think a driver can kill hardware think again: I was a victim of the ATI catalyst driver for the 9800 series that ran the refresh rate of my uber-at-that-time 21" Sony Trinitron CRT out-of-spec and killed it. This was confirmed by others loosing their monitors with the same driver.

Try running your monitor at a refresh rate that it's not designed for and keep it that way for awhile and see what happens to your monitor.

Alot of douchebag ATI fanboys (not saying if your an ATI fan that you are a douchebag, but there seemed to be a large number of ATI fans at that time, that were also major douchebags...........a guy named Evnas or something like that reminds me of their leader), which I'm sure are unfortunately alive today, proclaimed ATI could do no wrong.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-20859.html

Ahhhh the good old days: http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=239162
 
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At this point I am running safely back on XP with older drivers. And a newly RMA'd card. I won't be going to Win 7 until Nvidia gets their shit together.

Best I can tell my issue stemmed from failed VRAM. This is a card that worked perfectly since Feb 2009 and dies 2 days after the install of 191.07.

The later driver sets. 191.07 specifically seem to either stress the the video cards components more or more likely the fan is not being ramped when under load. I imagine for cards at stock or barely higher clocks this would not be an issue. However I have a BFG GTX 280 OCX, which has some pretty significant bumps over Nvidia spec, significantly on the VRAM.

At this point I will need to either max my fan speed or down clock my card for insurance purposes. This shit should just work. have not tried the new 195's until I know they won't result in another RMA.
 
hmmm.. from the evga forums it appears to only affect peeps with the NF200 chip on their mobo, but only some in that group.. I loaded up 191.07 last night and so far so good.. but all intel chipset here (giga ud5).. whew.
 
PS3 said:
Could be since power management is controlled at the driver level...or is that just the fan speed...hmmm.... One thing is for sure, if your MB has an nvidia chipset, might want to stay away from the new drivers...perhaps until this is issue with the 191.07 drivers is addressed or a new driver version is released.
Click to expand...

This is mainly related to only 191.07 and it is not a general issue as some had no issue with NF200 and 191.07. So why even bother with 191.07 if you got the NF-chip and know that the issue is there and there is other driver to choose from? This is just one reson why i dont jump on the newest driver day1 and after some reserch about perfomance/issues on forums.
 
nForce 780a SLI motherboard, GeForce GTX260, 191.07 drivers. No issues to report :D

So you guys think it's limited to nForce 200 based boards?
 
Chromatik said:
At this point I am running safely back on XP with older drivers. And a newly RMA'd card. I won't be going to Win 7 until Nvidia gets their shit together.

Best I can tell my issue stemmed from failed VRAM. This is a card that worked perfectly since Feb 2009 and dies 2 days after the install of 191.07.

The later driver sets. 191.07 specifically seem to either stress the the video cards components more or more likely the fan is not being ramped when under load. I imagine for cards at stock or barely higher clocks this would not be an issue. However I have a BFG GTX 280 OCX, which has some pretty significant bumps over Nvidia spec, significantly on the VRAM.

At this point I will need to either max my fan speed or down clock my card for insurance purposes. This shit should just work. have not tried the new 195's until I know they won't result in another RMA.
Click to expand...

Which older drivers did you use Chromatik? I've had this exact same problem. RMA'd my BFG GTX 280 OC. The new card arrived today and I was planning on putting it in after work. (Thanks for the help with my RMA by the way Jeff.) This was before I found these threads talking about the 191.07 driver screwing everything up.
 
These drivers have caused consistent BSOD on a friends PC whenever he enters a game (it is near-instant with Dragon Age: Origins). I have not installed them. Sorta glad I've stuck with 186.xx so far.
 
There are the 195.55 beta drivers that you can download at nvidia.
 
djod said:
Which older drivers did you use Chromatik? I've had this exact same problem. RMA'd my BFG GTX 280 OC. The new card arrived today and I was planning on putting it in after work. (Thanks for the help with my RMA by the way Jeff.) This was before I found these threads talking about the 191.07 driver screwing everything up.
Click to expand...

Currently I'm running the 182.08's for WinXP. Have been playing Mass Effect and Fallout 3 without issues since the new card came in a few weeks ago.
 
So the driver issue is only effecting people with OC'd cards and anyone that has not scaled up the fan speed on the GPU/GPU's?

I'm sticking with the 186 release then, since that works fine for me.
 
Outamyhead said:
So the driver issue is only effecting people with OC'd cards and anyone that has not scaled up the fan speed on the GPU/GPU's?

I'm sticking with the 186 release then, since that works fine for me.
Click to expand...

Not completely sure what the issue was honestly. I do know the facts are as follows

My card worked fine since Feb 2009.
Installed 191.07 on Win 7 RTM
Within 2 days was getting system locks with screen corruption on every game.
Additionally the cards stickers (all 3 of them) had begun to roll up where they had gotten so hot.
Reinstalling OS didn't resolve

RMA'd the card and went back to XP with older drivers and I'm gaming again.
 
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