SC2 melted my PC. I haven't had a chance to really dig into it yet, but it seems my nVidia 295GTX has melted. My PC boots up just fine, but as soon as I ask the card to do some 3D processing (ie start up a game like WoW) the PC crashes.
Cautionary info so you good folks can avoid the same problem:
1. nVidia released driver version 196.75. This driver has since been withdrawn because it stops the fans from adjusting to keep the card cool. If you are running nVidia's 196.75 drivers ROLL THE FUCK BACK NOW
2. SC2 has no frame rate or rendering speed caps. This means the menus and the static scenes between missions, despite their simplicity, stress your graphics card harder than Crysis. The bigger problem is when playing the game without much going on. Basically if you have a big old army it works the processor and such, and the graphics card gets throttled by a lack of system resource. If you don't have a big army then all resource goes to the graphics card, it renders things so hardcore that it goes insane and melts. So if you are playing SC MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BIG FUCKING ARMY (and/or use the below workaround from Blizzard).
In my case I was not using the bad nVidia drivers afaik, but I did have a very small army. I have a GTX295, it is not over-clocked, and my PC is liquid-cooled.
Blizzard's explanation:
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"Certain screens make your hardware work pretty hard. [For example], screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient," Blizzard rep "Martyt" wrote in an official Starcraft 2 forum post.
"This is because the game has nothing to do so it is primarily just working on drawing the screen very quickly. A temporary workaround is to go to your Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt file
and add these lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
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