Mar 28, 2011 19:01 GMT  ·  By

Shortly after the first reports regarding Nvidia' GTX 590 tendency to overheat and burn under heavy overclocking conditions hit the Web, the company has issued an official response about these problems and urges all its customers to use the card with the latest official drives and limit the amount of voltage applies to the GPUs.

The first reports regarding this issue appeared right on March 24, the day when the card was released, as Sweclockers has posted online a movie of a GTX 590 that went up in smoke during a failed overclocking attempt.

According to Nvidia, this was caused by a bug in the over current protection implementation found in the beta drives the card was tested with and by the high voltages used for overclocking the cores.

As a result, Nvidia recommends all GTX 590 users to keep the voltages at the default value and to use the latest version of the drives that can be downloaded from the company's website.

“The few press reports on GTX 590 boards dying were caused by overvoltaging to unsafe levels (as high as 1.2V vs. default voltage of 0.91 to 0.96V), and using older drivers that have lower levels of overcurrent protection.

“Rest assured that GTX 590 operates reliably at default voltages, and our 267.84 launch drivers provide even more additional levels of protection for overclockers.

“For more information on overclocking and overcurrent protection on GTX 590 please see our knowledge base article here,” reads a statement sent by Nvidia to Hardware Canucks.

The article recommends all users who want to overclock the GTX 590 to pair it with one of the EK or Danger Den waterblocks available right now or go for the factory water-cooled EVGA Classified Hydro Copper.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 is built using two GF110 GPUs and packs no less than 1024 CUDA cores, 128 texturing units, 64 ROP units as well as 3GB of GDDR5 memory.