This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use

Owners of Nvidia-based video cards may be putting those cards, as well as the rest of their PCs, at risk if they’re using the latest version of Nvidia’s graphics drivers. First reported by beta testers playing Starcraft II, the problem with the recently released driver update 196.75 may affect you, even if you’re not a gamer.

Starcraft II’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, issued an official statement in the game’s Battle.net forums advising users to roll back to the previous driver version, 196.21, to avoid any issues. The company has diagnosed the problem as related to fan control, which is causing overheating. According to a story at IncGamers.com, in some extreme cases this is causing physical damage to not only the video card but the processor and motherboard as well.

Blizzard also advises that the problem could affect Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. But any current Windows version (32- and 64-bit XP, Vista, and Windows 7) running the driver is susceptible, which means that using any 3D application with the new drivers could put your system at risk.

Nvidia responded to our request for comments with the following statement: “We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our Web site in the meantime.”