TR Forums

I have read on several different forums that the new 301.42 NV drivers damage/could damage the hardware/graphics card over long run times or while under load and running for a long time. Has anyone seen any actual data that would point to this?

RAMBO wrote:

I have read on several different forums that the new 301.42 NV drivers damage/could damage the hardware/graphics card over long run times or while under load and running for a long time. Has anyone seen any actual data that would point to this?

What forums? Links? I don't see anything on Nividia's own forums or EVGA forums... I have non-overclocked EVGA GTX680, card is working fine with these even after 10 hours of gaming...

I think you're mixing up the stories about 196.75 driver release... which was a long, long time ago

JohnC wrote:

I think you're mixing up the stories about 196.75 driver release... which was a long, long time ago

no I was asking people who had problems. Troubleshooting before it gets to me if there is a problem.

Loaded the 301.42 drivers a few days ago w/my GTX460 (non overclocked) and played a few games over several days - no problems here.

If you're really concerned about it, run a program like GPU-Z and check the temperatures when playing with your current drivers to get a baseline. Then load the new drivers and run the games, checking GPU-Z for the temps under the new drivers. If they really can "smoke" your system (which I doubt, but you never know...) the GPU temps would rise which you could monitor with GPU-Z before they get to critical levels (over 130 degrees?)

Ever since installing the new drivers, I have a permanent while line about 3/4 of an inch from the bottom of my screen. It takes a few minutes to show up after each reboot. I tried installing Ubuntu to get it to go away, but it is now showing up there too. I'm thinking the drivers permanently damaged my GeForce GTX 460 Fermi. I'll be building a new system soon, and will probably look at what ATI has to offer, if it gets confirmed that the new NVIDIA drivers really do damage cards like I think this one did to mine. It could happen with any company I suppose, but I'm afraid to shell out $400 for a top of the line card if this is going to happen again.

No problems so far here, but sometimes a driver can do funny things. Always good to be cautious. I have doubts about the general quality of nvidia's cards anyway, with TDR's and all that. I did have amd drivers kill a 4870. Wouldn't idle properly and I think the heat killed it. Asus replaced it and amd fixed the bug in the next driver. Most cards come with some sort of warranty, so check that out before buying something. Exception being you don't have a replacement handy, of course.

Edit: nvidiaInspector works pretty good as a free troubleshooting/monitoring tool. It also can restart your driver with the -restartDisplayDriver command line parameter. That helps when switching from adaptive to maximum, because apparently nvidia's drivers are too buggy to work when you hit apply.

began noticing lines through graphics on icons on desktop and tray after playing Civ 5 for several hours, recurring incident. The game started to slow and take long times between battles/results and the turns. This never happened on the older graphics drivers. I have 301.42. Has anyone else had a similar issue or any other kind of problem after installing 301.42? EVGA GTX 560 Ti, no OC

My 8800GT keeps crashing (driver resets, BSOD) but this happened before driver update.
I figured out it can be stable when I underclock GPU to the lowest Rivatuner allows which is about half of normal speed.
Later, I found out I can unlink shader clocks and put it into normal speed while GPU core still runs at half speed, then it remains stable
and performance loss is negligible.

I'm guessing ROP and TMU runs at half speed now so I'm losing something (AA AF capabilities?).
It's BFG brand who used to have life time warranty but it went out of business. I used it 4 years so, I don't care if it dies.

I'm still going to buy nvidia. I like their driver features (FXAA, adaptive vsync, etc). Waiting for GT 640 for it's lower TDP.

the 301.xx drivers just made my 460 slow down after anywhere between 1-3 hours gaming, between p8(405mhz) and p12(50mhz) speeds, would just sit at 200mhz clock and not budge, unless i restarted.
Before those official drivers came out i tried the 301.xx beta, it would just straight up lock the card at 25mhz clock speed.
reverted back to 296.10 drivers to keep it from happening.
from what i've poked around i wasnt the only one with odd clock frequency problems

Everything is smoother after the revert to the 2xx v drivers.

I updated them but I can neither confirm nor deny as I haven't had much time for gaming lately. All I know is my GTX 580 ran Diablo 3 for several hours this weekend when I passed out and it hadn't crashed when I woke up.