9600GT fan issues

[jesterb84]

I recently placed my 9600GT into my system and proceeded to install the latest Windows 7 64-bit Forceware drivers (197.13) as this is a fresh install of Windows. However, I noticed that my 9600GT's fan would stop randomly and the card would reach up to 106C when idle. This was particularly strange as I would have thought this was an isolated issue with the 196.75 drivers (known to have fan issues), which were never installed on my system in the first place.

At first, I believed this to be a hardware issue but upon rebooting, the 9600GT's fan would spin full speed during POST and then proceed to wind down to about 30% in Windows, only to stop randomly again and heat the card up to 106C.

I then thought this was perhaps a lingering bug with the newer drivers and proceeded to uninstall the Forceware driver and revert back to the stock WDM driver. However, the same problem with the fan randomly stopping and overheating the card appeared again.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what exactly is the issue? It's hard to justify it being hardware-related as the fan spins 100% at POST on each reboot, yet is stopping in Windows seemingly randomly with both the WDM and 197.13 drivers.

 

[BernardP]

After spending time looking at the Nvidia Driver Forum since 197.13 was released:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=33

I have come to the conclusion that there are still fan problems with the 197.13 driver. And as you report, problems persist after people uninstall 197.13 and revert to a previous driver. It's as if there are files from 197.13 that remain after the uninstall (even with DriverSweeper).

I never installed 197.13 and am staying with 196.21 until I'm confident these fan problems are gone for good.

In your situation, your safest course of action would be to format the drive and start over with a new Windows fresh install... and the 196.21 driver.

 

[jesterb84]

BernardP, thanks for the reply. Yes, it seems 197.13 carries the same problematic code branch as the 196.75 drivers. Absolutely nothing I do can get rid of the bug - even when I uninstall the driver, reboot to safe mode, run Drive Sweeper, then restart. Not even when Windows reverts back to the stock WDM driver, the problem with the fan still persists. And I just finished reinstall Windows and got everything up and running again! I remembered a time when the NVIDIA Detonator drivers were the best, but now I've lost all confidence - sticking with ATI. This overheating is a serious issue and a potential safety hazard.