Nvidia 196.75 GPU driver burning up graphics cards

By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: March 5, 2010, 11:27 AM EST

Nvidia has yanked the latest WHQL graphics driver release (196.75) from its website after reports started pouring in about insane temperature increases and card failures. According to affected users, their systems start suffering low frame rates, freezes or even lock downs when playing games. This includes graphically intensive titles like Crysis or the StarCraft 2 Beta, as well as older, less demanding games such as World of Warcraft.

Some users are reporting temperature increases of up to 104 degrees Celsius. The problem seems to be related to the fan controller, with fans slowing down or outright stopping while gaming, and in extreme cases could cause damage to the motherboard or the processor as well. Nvidia is advising anyone who has already installed the latest drivers to go back to the 196.21 WHQL release

Also if you have an ATI HD 5770 or newer the 2/2/2010 drivers are messed up and locks up display and shuts off monitor so wait for the newest drivers 3/18/2010 I believe

I believe that it was the Nvidia drivers that fried my GFX card.  Was not playing anything until I could get a new card.. Which took almost  3 weeks to save up some money. 
Anyway, I got the 250 GTS 1GB and I must say, it's pretty good.