vid card suddenly overheating

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corge

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 21, 2009
Messages
248
I have an Asus GTX580 (the three slot one with the dual fans on it) in my computer and for whatever reason, within the past couple of weeks, it's started to get very hot.

I haven't added any new hardware since my initial build over 6 months ago and everything has been running just fine. I play BF3 and it's always works perfectly. Until last week, I've had no issues. I noticed one night when I was playing that the fans in the case started spinning faster. When I touched the top of the case, it was actually really warm. I opened the side of the case and all of the heat was coming from right around the video card.

Processor temps are easily within range, but video card temps were very high according to Asus' Smart Doctor or whatever the program is called that allows you to overclock and monitor. I'm not doing any overclocking on this machine.

I've pulled the card out, blew duster over it, though there was very little dust on the card or in the machine.

Now, every time I play BF3, my card heats up and the fans start to spin full blast.

I have the video card, and i7 2nd gen proc., 8gigs ram, SSD hard drive and a pcie sound card all on a thermaltake 850w psu.

Any ideas or suggestions? I've contacted Asus as well as this card was purchased last July.
 
Look at the fan speed. It's ramping up to 100% and staying there. Is that normal?
 
I have the Asus smart doctor (or whatever it's called) running so that when the temp reaches a certain level, the fans just go full speed. It's either do that or my case gets EXTREMELY HOT.
 
corge said:
Now, every time I play BF3, my card heats up
Click to expand...

Sounds like your case needs some airflow work, that's all. The card is fine at 65c. Check your PSU fan, and case fans? It's not jammed up against the wall?
 
I use a custom fan profile in Afterburner for my overclocked 6970. When/if the card hits 75C the fan is ramped up to near 100%. I have headphones on for gaming all the time so I could care less about the noise. The stock fans or profiles in most video cards seem to angle more towards keeping the card QUIET, not COOL. Nearly every video card I've ever had, weather or not it be Nvidia or AMD, almost never use their stock fans at 100% unless the card is 85-90C, which is way to hot IMO. Even my old 8800 GTX would do this. The fan would never get close to 100%, even if the card was at 90C. Unless you absolutely cannot stand the card being at 100%, I would leave it alone, but then again like I said, I care more about keeping my card cool and less about the noise.
 
I don't care about the noise. I'm trying to keep the card cool because if you read above, the past couple of weeks it has started getting extremely hot for some reason and no changes have been made to software or to the hardware.
 
Your log says the card is getting up to 65C, which is fine. Are you getting conflicting temps with different programs?
 
corge said:
the past couple of weeks it has started getting extremely hot for some reason and no changes have been made to software or to the hardware.
Click to expand...

For the love of goodness, post a capture with your custom fan profile turned off. edit: nevermind, I unsubbed.
 
Last edited:
Just to be clear, as this has been alluded to in several posts already:

65'C is just fine for a card under load

Unless the card is throwing errors, artifacting, or crashing, I wouldn't worry about it. But if you must worry about it, you can do 2 things:

1) remove the heatsink and reapply the thermal compound, using a good compound obviously
2) add another case fan or two to exhaust all of that heat faster.

For reference, I have a GTX 460 overclocked to 850/1700/1950 @ 1.050V that runs at 64'C all day while folding. The card uses an Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus II with a custom fan profile set to spin at 100% above 60'C.

 
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