A Swedish overclocking site demonstrated a newly launched high-end Nvidia GTX 590 going up in smoke which they attribute to a flaw in a specific version of Nvidia’s drivers.
"The first video card gave up the ghost when I overclocked by raising the voltage to the GPU," said SweClockers tester Jonas Thörnqvist, initially thinking that the card may just be a "Monday specimen."
However another SweClocker contributor also experienced Nvidia’s brand new video card self-destructing which promoted Thörnqvist to explore the issue with Nvidia.
"Another video [card] was sacrificed in order to reach the conclusion that the driver is 267.52 which is the culprit."
SweClockers concluded that Nvidia’s safety mechanisms work correctly in the driver version 267.71 but don’t in the earlier version leading to a runaway thermal issue.
SweClockers said the GeForce GX 590 "straddles the boundary of what is practical to handle in terms of power consumption and heat generation," adding that the situation was worse when overclocking.
See the video below: