GRAPHICS OUTFIT Nvidia has turned up the heat with its latest drivers according to World of Warcraft (WoW) developer, Blizzard Entertainment.

The developer has suggested that the Green Goblin's latest drivers, version 196.75, seem to cause cards to overheat due to faulty regulation of the fan found in the majority of cooling designs. This leads to cards either throttling down or in some cases biting the dust altogether.

Some users have been able to stave off overheating by manually setting the fan speeds on their cards, however those not in the know expressed their dismay at drops in frame rates due to throttling of chip and memory speeds. Speaking to Inc Gamers, Nvidia said that it hasn't been able to "verify and root cause this issue" and until it does so the offending drivers have been removed from Nvidia's website.

The drivers, released on 2 March, were WHQL-certified and included promises of performance increases in certain games and, ironically, "enhanced SLI support for World of Warcraft". Unsurprisingly WoW players snapped up the update believing it would deliver a free performance boost.

According to user reports on various forums, no particular card or chip is affected, with complaints being posted from users using the almost archaic 9800 series cards all the way up to the GTX295. Both Blizzard and Nvidia are saying that users should either stick with the version 196.21 drivers or downgrade to that version, which is on Nvidia's website.

The problem isn't specific to Blizzard's titles since the fan is regulated based upon GPU usage, so any intensive 3D application could cause the issue to flare up.

Those who have been following Nvidia recently won't be all that surprised to hear about the firm's products overheating, it's just that more such news is expected only after Fermi launches. µ