8800 GT - performance degradation

[toygard]

Having a weird problem with my Club3D 8800 GT card that i bought a few weeks ago. In the beginning it worked really well, and Crysis ran fine at high settings. A few days ago i started noticing some slowdown and the GPU benchmark had gone from 40 fps average to around 20. Performance goes back to normal after a reboot but then it degrades again.

The card runs really hot, tops up at about 88 degrees, even though it's supposed to have better cooling with a radial heatpipe and my rig is decently ventilated. So i'm thinking heat is the issue, but will the card behave this way because of heat? And why now? It worked fine in the first two weeks and i would have noticed if the performance suddenly halved.

What do you guys think? Is there anything else that could cause the card to behave this way?

 

[videopho]

The card perhaps is working in throttle mode due to heat or what not.
Remove and clean whatever the driver you're currently using.
Install latest (174.74Beta??) and use RivaTuner to monitor the temps and adjust the cooling fan according to the temps.

I had this happened to me once with my then brand new 8800GTS-512. I then did what I just suggested the card seems working ok ever since.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I think it's possible that the card is defective and needs to be replaced. That is entirely too hot especially for one with improved cooling on it.

 

[Sylvanas]

Sounds like a memory leak to me.....are you running the Crysis 1.2 patch with the 17x.xx drivers?

 

[toygard]

I should have mentioned that it also happens in other games. I only used Crysis as an example.

Thanks for your replies. I tried RivaTuner, but the fan tab doesn't show up in the system tweaks. Not supported? I guess this is just a bad card. I was a little sceptical to it and it's radial heatpipe before i ordered it, guess i should have trusted my gut.

I've decided to just send the card back, get a refund and hold off on getting a new video card for a while. PC gaming is less and less interesting to me these days anyway. Crysis is awesome though.