You might expect the software itself not to be the culprit that can cause a hardware failure, but how do you explain the situation with the 2013 WHQL drivers?

memory refresh:
https://modcrash.com/nvidia-display-driver-damaging-gpus/

Oddly enough, with 320.18 WHQL the video cards were canceled, but cards on older or newer drivers didn’t have this problem, even though they were simply loaded.

If I remember correctly I used this driver briefly for my old GTX 460 and then quickly downgraded it back to 314.22 WHQL due to issues with the driver. The card worked fine for a long time after that on both the 314.22 WHQL driver and later, until it was finally discontinued in 2014.

Sometimes I think sometimes if it was that driver that killed him in the long run, while it never got past 70C.

Shortly before it died it suddenly started showing heavy fps drops randomly at short intervals in Carmageddon Reincarnation then it was BSOD then it stopped at 800×600 with red horizontal lines splattered (not much) across the screen and the OS couldn’t win’ start yet Now because the Nvidia drivers had no way of communicating with it properly and thus got into a blue loop of death. Only safe mode still works.

I think it was the VRAM that gave up the ghost, those late bumps probably had something to do with error correction if it happened at all.

With this game, it does seem to be due to manufacturer specific hardware version x due to glaring flaws at that angle, but I would never rule out that the underlying issue between drivers and software communication to the hardware can’t cause problems.

Well pumping out 9999fps in a cropped scene or whatever doesn’t seem like the ideal mode for capacitors either, although I don’t hear people giving their video card the pipe when things like 3DMark06 or 3DMark Ice Storm cause the same thing, because they pump too Hundreds to thousands of frames easily.