Warning: be careful of the latest nVidia drivers.

[Doobrey]

Just thought I`d share this with you, incase it might happen to others.

I`d just installed the latest nVidia forceware drivers, and after testing it out on some games, my PC started acting up... random resets, explorer crashing left right and center etc etc.
Then I noticed the air coming out the back of the case was waaaay hotter than it normally is, almost like a hairdryer 8O
Opened the case up, felt the gfx card and couldn`t believe it hadn`t melted the solder, I couldn`t touch the card for more than a second.

Anyway, I let it cool down for an hour and restarted it. After much fiddling, managed to get to the hidden clockspeed settings. The new drivers had set the memory clock to double what it should have been (332 instead of 166, no wonder it got a bit toasty in there!).

Luckily my card seems to have survived, hope it doesn`t happen to anyone else.

If you don`t know how to enable the clockspeed settings, just open up regedit.exe and add this key, then it`ll be available from the nView Desktop Manager.

Goto this part in the registry.
HKLM\Software\nVidia Corporation\Global\NVTweak
then add a new dword, name=Coolbits value=3

[kenmo]

Hey, I recently upgraded my nVidia drivers, and I experienced a weird problem too, the random resets. Although it only seems to happen when my computer goes to standby mode, then back. It will draw the desktop, pause for a short while, flicker, and reset itself, then a popup will say the system crashed due to a video card failure.

It sucks, luckily it doesnt seem to do any damage.

[Shannara]

I downloaded the latest yesterday. Noticed that nVidia screwed up again (as usual). The refreshing rate is screwie with all games and there are white blocks everywhere...

POS nvidia, we need a better driver company..nvidia should stick with what it can bearly do in the first place, create video cards.

[Doobrey]

POS nvidia, we need a better driver company..

Yup, and having them listen to users problems would help too. They just say "Tell the maker of your gfx card", the card maker says "Tell nVidia".
I give up, never buying or recommending any of their products again.

Every driver I`ve had from them has had some sort of problem. Some are dog slow, some just crash whenever I blink, some wait until I go and make a coffee then crash when I return, then the latest ones decide to overclock the memory and almost burnt the card out (and then crashed)

Oh well, hopefully it won`t matter to me much longer as I`m planning to ditch Winblows and move over to Macs (do they still use ATI gfx cards?)