Beware of new NVIDIA driver, it might burn your card

[THOMO]

I have a feeling that 'user error' will play a big role the majority of people claiming the drivers killed their cards.

You and me both.

well as someone who has tried to kill a 8800gtx by turning the fan off, then by removing the cooler both of which failed to kill the card i can tell you those cards are quite resilient. I'm wondering if maybe the driver issues come into play when using a 3rd party overclocking/tweaker app like powerstrip/rivatuner/precision/afterburner/etc... i know often new drivers don't play nice with those apps and its possible the apps were causing the problem. How many of the people exhibiting the problem are running a 3rd party app.

I think you're spot on.

The day couldn't start better...
Turned on my PC with my 9800GT in it, unknowing about this issue at hand after just installing the drivers some nights before (first time I fired up the comp with the new drivers), went to get coffee in the morning as I usually do during the computer start-up, I come back and the card's dead.
Tried to wait 15 mins for it to cool down, but it was to no avail. The fan goes up to 100% in the beginning, but the screen will not display anything except the usual "no signal".

I'm really starting to doubt the fact that Nvidia drivers are better than ATi, because it just fried my god damn card.

I'm sorry I can't believe this. Your card even with NO working fan shouldn't have died simply due to sitting on the desktop for the length of time it takes to make a coffee. What's your ambient temp 80c

I've seen these gpu's at 80c-90c-100c and still performing...long term. You boot yours once and at some point during boot (since it was at 100% when you powered system on) your fan slowed/stopped and 10minutes of desktop later it's fried????

You must be the unluckiest person ever.