[SOLVED] Is Nvidia Driver 531.29 blowing up graphics cards?

Mar 18, 2023
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Thursday night (3/16/23) I was playing Marvel Midnight Suns on my EVGA RTX 3090. At one point I could hear the fans spike, sounded like a leaf blower and then poof no video. Swapped out an older card and confirmed it was the GPU. Went ahead and made a trip to Microcenter on Friday to get a new card and spent the day replacing it, cleaning up the PC, and doing all the maintenance to it that I have neglected so I can play in the Diable 4 beta. This morning I am reading through the D4 forums and started reading about other players suffering the same fate as myself but while playing D4 and assumed it was D4 killing their cards. My first thought was to come to this forum to see if anyone else is having similar issues? From my own experience and reading the other posts it seems to be 531.xx related. After I replaced my card I reverted back to 528.49 and have not had any problems.
 
Solution
3000 seriers were blowing up for a while now, you can google search new world game bricking rtx 30xx series on daily basis
diablo 4 just tanks hard your gpu, if it has manufacturing defects, it will blow up
Mar 18, 2023
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The driver doesn't blow up the GPU, it looks like they removed some built in limiters and if an OEM was shipping the card factory overclocked then it's possible to cook off a component without sufficient cooling.
Not sure I completely agree with you. There are many cases of bad drivers damaging video cards.
 
Mar 18, 2023
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You guys were right, just a manufacturing problem that only seems to affect EVGA and Gigabyte cards. I didn't play New World but after reading the articles now see that EVGA and Gigabyte had issues with their high end 3000 series cards. Add Midnight Suns and D4 to the list of games that will expose those manufacturing issues. Hopefully people's cards are still under warranty.
 
Do you guys mean to tell us that games can break your video card? Holy smokes.

It's way more nuanced then that. Pretty much all power that electronics use ends up getting turned into waste heat that needs to be gotten rid of. If a card use's 400W of power, then it's 400W of thermal heat that needs removed. To further compound it, that number is a result of the combination of every component so even if the thermal design can handle the total heat, there might be a specific component that gets more then it was designed for. By default the GPU's driver is supposed to protect from this situation by detecting voltage and thermals of the card and down clocking it when things pass a certain point, this is called "throttling". If that doesn't work correctly or has it's values not line up with the tolerances from the manufacturer, then something can be pushed beyond it's limit and burn out.