Is it possible for bad drivers to permenantly damage your gfx card?

You know various drivers give various performance improvements or deprovments or problems to the card and so on. Is it possible for a driver to damage the card?

 

cant happen

 

If this is related to the other thread...normally no, and a game can't damage your card either.


I'm well aware of the Nvidia driver/GPU fan problem, but I think this was an isolated case. Cards have thermal protection built in anyway...

 

Actually it can happen but its rare,it happened when the nvidia driver series driver i think it was 196.75, if you remember some cards were overheating and some people actually fried there cards! Nvidia pulled them from there site,i remember using this driver a while back and had no problems at the time,but like i said its very very very rare.

Reading feedback from others will keep you well updated so not to worry.

 

a driver update killed (or at least helped to kill) a 7800gs of mine. this was a long time ago when nv drivers were still in the 90's. i was on 92.9 (i think) when a new set came out, 94.XX and i updated. i started playing CoD2 and i was amazed that my performance seemed to be better. then i rounded a corner and some textures started to go checkered (on barrels and other scattered objects). i went around another corner and everything seemed ok. a minute or so later my system rebooted. when i got back to windows the whole screen looked like a red/blue/pink/black checkerboard. i switched the drivers back but it was too late.

i had oc'd the card, but my temps were good and i had stress tested it. no other games had given me any issues until that point (when i was playing CoD2 the card was at stock, always did that to compare base results in benches). maybe it was already on its way out, but updating that driver did something.

 

The driver didn't kill your card, you did.

 

ultimately it was me who killed it. i did have it oc'd...however it was strange that the card worked fine until that update after it had been working proprly for nearly a year. the oc i had in the card was minimal (roughly the clocks of other factory oc cards), and when it rebooted during that first run of CoD it was at stock clocks. the replacement card i got (another 7800gs) also gave the same errors with the driver i mentioned, only that one lived for a long time...until a few weeks ago actually

 

+1
Yes indeed.

 

Yeah the 8800's are dropping like flies atm.
The last 1-2 mths has seen a barrage of forum threads related to G80/G92 failure....

 

driver changes or even games can highlight underlying hardware problems, so at the end of the day no, and if it does its a hardware issue and RMA

 

Drivers do not and can not kill your video card. Overclocking can and does kill your cards. Out of the blue it will happen without any warning either...

 

yes they can, they can highlight underlying problems with the hardware and over time can result in dead hardware. Its the same with cpus or any hardware, e.g. when furmark came out it could easily brick hardware, ok its not a driver, but its just using the API available to stress hardware.

A drover with bad fan control could potentially kill hardware.

 

You mean there are ppl still using the 8800?

That's like hmm 4 generations back?

 

Absolutely not.

 

As long as parameters like clock speeds, voltage and fan speed can be controlled by software, there is a chance that bad drivers can damage your card. However, in practice this is very unlikely and the only case I remember was one with the fan speed with an old NVIDIA driver. Virus-like software that finds a way to alter these parameters is a more realistic probability.

 

Yeah, those people should beg for your pardon for not beign able to buy (or not caring to buy) a HD5970. Then kill themselves for not having the newest hardware.

Anyway OP. THINK. Dont ask, THINK.

How in the earth a GPU could be damaged? Physicaly, thats how. OCing can physicaly damage the GPU internally, or the memory chips.

How a driver, a piece of software could cause such damage? You dont break a GPU by sending to it bad information. It would artifact at most, and just cuz software issue, thus, meaning that the GPU is actually fine, and it would work ok if you just use working software.

That doesnt not include the fact that a driver can controll the fan, and if it screws up the fan, the GPU would over heat. But technically, the heat is the issue.

Driver caused the heat, and heat killed the gpu, the driver cant directly kill the gpu cuz is just a piece of software, it cant damage the card physically.

 

yeah of course but it's understood if the driver gave the wrong instructions that made the card malfunction that's counted as the drivers damaging the card.

How about some drivers making the gpu run at 100% in idle mode? Isn't that bad?

 

A driver doesn't give a "wrong instruction" that could kill a card. Software can't kill hardware unless the user instructs it to perform beyond specification. ie; overclocking. A driver on it's own won't kill a GPU, the same way a virus won't destroy a hard drive (it may require a format, but it won't stop it from working).

 

My God really? They should be shot..


When my 8800GTX can't run games at high settings & decent FPS, then I'll upgrade.
Right now there's no point...

(If Deus Ex 3 proves too much, then yeah I'll def buy a new card.)

 

Well, I would suggest upgrading, and you could get a 9800 GTX or an HD 4870 since their prices have been knocked down so much, especially since you would need a better cpu, props on getting that Hynix from 400 to 500MHz, thats surprising for a 2x2 set, I got there with a Nanya 2x1GB set myself.