As many of you may have already read here and there people on various community forums are mentioning that the 3.8?s are overheating their video cards (foremost Radeon 9800 Pro cards), along with monitors burning out... Rage3D has many long threads going on here while many users speculate that it has to do with the new and useful VPU Recover or Overdrive features (Overdrive Radeon XT only) that ATI implemented into their driver code with Catalyst 3.8. However ATI has again been working closely with their beta testers and the community and so far they have not found any problems on their side. This however only refers to stock settings cards whereas many users report problems with oc'ed cards at settings they did not have problems with prior to Catalyst 3.8. Terry Makedon, Senior Software Manager at ATI, has sent out the following notice:

1) Overheating: We have spent a great deal of time analyzing the temperatures due to the CATALYST 3.8 drivers. We do not under any circumstance see anything near a 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature (but we don?t overclock our test cards either). We do see a slight increase in temperature in certain cases (3Dmark2003 Nature Scene for example). However any temperature increase is well within our safety range. Investigation continues and we are trying to determine why this change in temperature exits 2) Monitors: We have spent a great deal of time trying to reproduce this problem and analyzing the driver code. There is nothing to be found. At this point we are working very closely with an ATI Beta Tester who experienced a monitor loss. There have been zero reports in our customer support of monitors dying.