I have been running two Nvidia 8800GTX graphics cards in a home pc, for about two to two and a half years now, they have been running fine, until last week, when they both went pop, within four days of each other!

This article explains my findings on this, and my ongoing discussions with Nvidia about a potentially fatally flawed driver release, and incredibly badly timed Warranty Expiration.

I had applied a driver update a few days before this incident took place, and everything seemed fine. I'll point out at here that I don't really game on this pc anymore. Having two 8800GTX's is a bit overkill now, as all my gaming has moved onto the Xbox 360. This is a valid point as essentially I am only running desktop applications, and Windows 7, so nothing too stressful.

Tuesday – Card one goes pop

On the Tuesday I fired up my desktop, and was greeted with a driver error message :

This caused my entire pc to become unresponsive, so I rebooted. When the pc came back up I was greeted with this screen.

The artifacts from the GPU are pre-bios, meaning that it is totally unrelated to windows drivers.

At this point I put the problem down to a random hardware failure, and wrote it off.

Saturday – Card two goes pop

On the Saturday I was firing up the same pc, now with only one 8800GTX in it, and after about four minutes (the time it takes to load windows and start a VM ware server) I had the same error message as above. My screen refreshes a lot, and the monitor has to re detect any input signals. Again after re booting I get a screen covered in artifacts.

This card is slightly different in that windows actually stops the card from running as an 8800GTX. It is just a standard VGA card now, I get this message:

I have discovered online that this means there is an actual hardware fault on the card.

Since both cards failed so close together I thought I'd have a search around (Google is your friend) and discovered that there are many (many!) reports of this online.

Nvidia Pulls Graphics Card-frying 196.75 Driver: Toms hardware

NVIDIA pulls 196.75 driver amid reports it's frying graphics cards: Engadget

Nvidia's own forums: Nvidia Forum

Google search on 'Nvidia driver fry graphics cards': Google search

I have confirmed with ASUS that one of my cards is two months out of warranty( Why are you always just out of warranty!) but it can be potentially fixed.

I am also in discussions with Nvidia about this, but its been a week, and five emails detailing different testing routines, so slow going. I am really hoping that they will take responsibility, but in the meantime I'll just keep responding to their testing requests until they run out of ideas.