Not soon after NVIDIA released the latest GeForce/ION drivers, version 196.75, came in a surge of complaints from users that installed said update and fried their GPU.
The very first reports of problems came from Battle.net. Symptoms started from low FPS after driver installation on Blizzard games (Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 Beta) and finally frying the GPU due to excessive heat.
The bug on version 196.75 keeps the fan speed of the GPU at minimum, hence the overheating problem. This puts all fan-cooled, NVIDIA graphics cards at risk. Passively cooled cards don’t seem to be affected (after all, there’s no fan speed to break :D).
NVIDIA hasn’t commented on this yet, but the drivers download links have been deleted. The fix? Simply install an older version of the driver or simply don’t open any application that’ll stress your GPU.