DescentBB

Just how accruate is the temp monitor on the Geforce FX 5900 ultra/61.77 driver? Today I decided to dust out my Leadtek winfast a350 ultra tdh myvivo card because the driver was reporting a core temp of 92C while playing doom3. Mind you it was completely stable at the time running at default clocks with no artifacts.

So I pulled the cover off, blasted the dust. Knowing that while the cover is off the heatsink is just sitting on top of the GPU not held down by anything but the thermal grease, I decided I might as well swap the nasty white grease out with some fresh new arctic silver.

Now the GPU reports 46-47C idle in windows instead of 50C, but the temps in 3d still show as high as 91C, the core shutdown temp in the drivers is 140C. So I wonder, is this thing really hot enough to run a coffeemaker or is the driver just reporting it wrong? The card does get too hot to touch while running but stability has never been a problem and the card overclocks well clear up to 500 MHz core.

Under the leadtek shell the card is a refrence board FX 5900 ultra with 2.2 NS BGA ram. Maybe I should get a waterblock for it.

http://www.indianheadtel.net/~dutennj/temps.gif

NVidia cards from the 5200 up to 5950U can run upto 134C, i get the same temps on my 5600 U

Hm, my Gainward Ultra/1800 XP GS (5950U) went down to 39C idle at 74F environment. Temps in Dm3 hovered around 77C IIRC, outside temp of the heatsink was 59C max. (hard to touch..). If you redo the memory heatsinks on the 5900U you have to use AS epoxy or this stuff since the mem sinks aren't sitting flush on the chips -- usually they are manufactor mounted w/ heat pads (yuk..). Same is true if you go water cooled using these blocks. I'm going that route next week, if you are interested I can post temps here.