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Problem of Blue Screen of Death for PCs with Outdated Processors After Installing New Nvidia Driver

By:Emma

TapTechNews August 5th news, recently some users reported that the computers equipped with outdated processors have encountered the problem of blue screen of death after installing the latest version of the Nvidia graphics card driver. After verification, this problem stems from Nvidia's termination of driver support for processors that do not support the POPCNT instruction set.

Problem of Blue Screen of Death for PCs with Outdated Processors After Installing New Nvidia Driver_0

According to TapTechNews' understanding, the POPCNT instruction set is an instruction set used to quickly count the number of 1s in a binary number, which is relatively common in modern processors. However, some older processors, such as the Core 2 Duo series, do not have this instruction set. Nvidia clearly stated in a technical document that starting from driver version 555, the Nvidia graphics card driver no longer supports processors that do not support the POPCNT instruction set.

When users install the Nvidia graphics card driver of version 555 or higher on these old computers, the system will encounter a blue screen error of 'unhandled system thread exception', resulting in inability to start normally. It should be noted that Microsoft has long announced that it no longer supports Windows 10 and 11 systems running on processors lacking the POPCNT instruction set, but this incompatibility of the Nvidia driver has further exacerbated this problem.

Although the number of users currently using outdated processors with high-end Nvidia graphics cards is relatively small, this is undoubtedly a hassle for some users who are still using these hardware. To avoid system crashes caused by automatic driver updates, it is recommended that these users manually turn off the driver update function in Windows Update.

Although the affected user group is relatively small, this issue still causes troubles for some users. If your computer encounters a blue screen after updating the graphics card driver, it may be advisable to check whether the system supports the POPCNT instruction set.

Nvidia driver outdated processor blue screen POPCNT instruction set

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