Sign of over-heating GPU?

[TOR_LordRaven]

So I was playing Half-life 2 the other day... and the game itself had been running for like.. i dunno, 8 hours.

I played some, ran to the store to get some snacks, while I was gone a friend played some, got back, we kept playing...

Then, we noticed that some of the textures started looking funky, a nice hot-pink color.

I suspected the videocard was overheating.. so I cranked up all the fans in my case (fan controller on the front)

They were all set to low, so I put them all on full blast, and a few minutes later the textures came back to normal.

Sign of over-heating? And could I have caused damage to the card?

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
3 GB PC-6400 Dual Channel DDR2
XFX GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512mb

Fans (All Blue LED Thermaltake):
Two 80mm Intake fans in the front
One 80mm Intake Fan on side (in window off-center to CPU/Ram)
One 80mm Exhaust Fan at the very top of the case
One 120mm Exhaust Fan out the back.

[Krom]

Sounds pretty plausible. Texture anomalies are usually caused by memory errors not the GPU core overheating though. The GPU core overheating tends to either hard lock the game, cause corrupt geometry or small random blocks of corruption that bounce around the scene or some (pixel shaded) objects similar to static.

Rather than cranking up the fans you may want to take a can of compressed air to the whole video card, dust buildup in the cooler is the easiest source of overheating to fix. I wouldn't worry about any damage to the card, given the useful lifespan of a video card by the time it would matter you most likely could replace it with something many times faster for $50.

[TOR_LordRaven]

Well - I know its not dust, the card is about 2 weeks old.

Maybe the memory itself got too hot. The side-case fan has plenty of air-flow right onto the memory itself - so maybe cranking that one up cooled them down enough.

Thanks for the Input Krom

[Krom]

Two weeks old... yeah that would tend to rule out dust. In that case if it persists, or gets worse I'd RMA the card while it is still under warranty just to be safe. I'd also put the card through some more touchy and seriously stressful games on long and taxing runs. If it runs fine with the extra cooling fans then I'd say it was a blip from insufficient ventilation, but if it does have more problems, even if they go away again, RMA the card.

Although it is unlikely, I'd also double check to make sure your power supply is sufficient to drive the whole system. I say its unlikely, because a PSU hitting the limits would impact the CPU as well as the GPU and you would probably be getting blue-screens. However there is one case where if you didn't evenly distribute the load on all the power rails from the PSU, it could impact just specific components.

[TOR_LordRaven]

Funny you mentioned that about the PSU.

I had a 350watt in my system when I bought this card. That was plenty to run the old one (GeForce 7900GT).

But the new one required at least 680watt to run in SLI mode which I plan on doing in the next couple of months.

So I had this card on my desk for a week, taunting me. I refused to install it until i got a new PSU - so its only a couple of weeks old as well an Ultra 750watt PSU. Huge fan on it too.

I got a Fan Controller because before the fans were always on at full tilt which made them very noisy.

I downloaded a program called RivaTuner, it shows my GPU at idel around 50c/122f, and under load it went to around 60c/140f. And that was about after an hour.

Seemed to run fine though - and I kept the fans pegged at full speed. I think I am going to MOD my case and open up more fan ports - that is if I have more problems.

[Zantor]

RivaTuner is very old. If you have an nVidia chipset, which you likely do, get nTune. nTune is a program nVidia made specifically for their chipsets and GPUs, which allows for monitoring, logging, overclocking, and other techy stuff. You will probably find it more useful than RivaTuner.

I agree that it is probably VRAM overheating, and that the side fan likely cooled off the hot spots.

I have had GPU overheating, and I was getting vertex shader errors from Half-Life 2; your funky textures would be something else. Noticing through the driver (I have an older board, VIA chipset) that the idle temp is 80 Celsius (176 Fahrenheit), I used craft hot glue to glue a fan onto my graphics card; I did this because I bought the card with no fan. Since the day I installed the fan, I have had no heat issues and my GPU stays at a cozy 43 Celsius (120 Fahrenheit), and has only been as high as 45 under load.

Hope this helps.

[Grendel]

RivaTuner is very old. If you have an nVidia chipset, which you likely do, get nTune. nTune is a program nVidia made specifically for their chipsets and GPUs, which allows for monitoring, logging, overclocking, and other techy stuff. You will probably find it more useful than RivaTuner.

Very unlikely. RivaTuner is maintained and the latest version is a couple months old. nTune is a POS that you unfortunately have to use for messing w/ NVIDIA chipsets -- stay away if you don't have one. RT's abilities to monitor and program your ATI/NVIDIA card and system are unparalled.

[TOR_LordRaven]

yeah - I got both actually, nTune and RivaTuner..
Riva seems a bit eaiser to use.

At any rate, my system Memory came with heat-spreaders, but I am thinking about getting an active cooling solution for them, something like this:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... &CatId=496

It has not given me funky textures since then. But then again the game has not ran for that long, and in all honesty, I don't anticipate it will be ran for that length of time again.

Thanks for the help guys!

[Zantor]

You are quite welcome. Next time you have issues, give a shout.