video card temps

[grendel19]

Been having a lot of crashing problems gaming on my '05 media center xp. I have an EVGA 7800GT, factory OC'd at 470/1200. These past 2 months, I couldn't play Painkiller and CoD2 without crashing and rebooting within 10 minutes.

After some researching, through ntunes, I've tried underclocking the video card to typical stock 7800GT at 400/1000, and cranking up the fan to 100%. Now CoD2 runs completely stable, but I still notice tiny artifacts here and there on minute details in the game.

Checking the video card temp after I close CoD2, it's at a whopping 100C. Idle is about 65C.

My question is, what's the typical temperature threshold for the 7800GT? I've read around the web and it seems 80C should be the highest you want to go. 90C+ is too high.

Or are there other suspects that are causing these gaming instabilities? I have the latest forceware driver 94.24. No instability doing regular tasks on Windows. Specs are P4 3.0, 3 HDD, 2GB ram, PSU at 375W, Dell XPS400 mobo.

I have no idea why this suddenly started to happen. This was never a problem before, and I haven't made any changes to my PC except adding a TV tuner card. I even reinstalled XP, but obviously that didn't fix the problem.

Should I invest in a Zalman VGA cooling fan? Would it make a difference?

Any opinions would be appreciated.

 

[Full_Throttle]

First of all, get some Arctic Silver 5 cooling paste. It's cheap, something like $9 shipped for a tube of it. Second, the OC'd version of the 7800 might also have volt modding on it, meaning that they tampered with how much power is flowing into it. This may mean that too much is going into the card, which, because you underclocked it, doesn't have anything to do but heat up. Check out on xtremesystems or notebookreview forums, where they'd know more about video cards. Or if you know enough about GPUs, check out what the voltages on it are right now, and look up what they should be.

But yeah, my suspicion is that the factory OC is what the trouble is. And no, you wouldn't want to go over 85C. Nothing in your computer would cause this problem, either.

Hope this helps,
Full_Throttle

 

[Vinny]

I'd guess it's a bad card or a dying cooler. AS5 won't help much beyond a degrees, maybe 1-2C. 65C idle is ridiculous... most cards run at 70C under load.

What's your processor temps in all of this? If that's high too, then it might be poor case cooling.

 

[grendel19]

Damn Dell won't allowing any programs to monitor the CPU temp... tried using Speedfan and SIW and only the HDD temps showed up.

Anyway, I opened the case and directed a normal fan on low onto it. The video card temps both at idle and load dropped about 10C.

Checking in the EVGA forums, looks like others are having the same heat problems with this card. Looks like I'll just have to pick up some VGA cooling for this card.

Thanks both for the help.