8800gts 320mb (G80) crashing often

[TC91]

I bought my card last june, around the middle of the month, have had to oc'ed at the clocks in my sig ever since. Recently i have been trying a ton of different drivers for better IQ / perf, and all of a sudden they all kept crashing even when i went back to the older drivers. I thought it might have been the cause of all those driver installations so i reinstalled windows but the driver reseting has not gone away (using 163.75 WHQL atm). i reset the card to stock clocks and it hasnt crashed so far, but it cant seem to hold the overclock in more demanding games. is my card dying already? thanks in advance

 

[TC91]

hmm i think something is wrong with the memory or it may have been overheating? i ve re-oc'ed the core/shaders with the memory @ 1620mhz and it runs fine without any problems so far.

 

[SickBeast]

You should never let videocards get too hot. You should also never run them at their limit overclocked. Back things down a fair bit.

I've seen several videocards destroyed by overclocking. It's much much riskier than overclocking a CPU which has thermal protection built in. AFAIK graphics cards do not have thermal protection beyond just throttling up the fan as the heat goes up. The problem is, once the heat crosses a certain point, ramping up the fan does nothing (plus there's only so fast that the fan can spin).

You should also keep in mind that the memory chips do not have thermal sensors and you have to be very careful about how hot they get and always make sure to run them at their rated speeds. I find that graphics memory rarely overclocks much at all beyond their stock/rated speeds.

Hopefully that helps a bit. :beer: