BFG 6800 GT OC heat and performance problems.

[ranova]

Hi,
I recently traded my radeon 9800pro for my friend's BFG 6800 GT OC (he bought the dell XPS to play games on). I installed it, connected the power cable, and booted it up -> everythings fine until I load World of Warcraft and it warns me that the temperature is above threshold levels (at 120 degrees Celcius) and it will have to decrease the performance. I exited the game and let the pc idle for a bit and came back and saw it was at 101 degrees C. I have tried leaving the case open (but still idles at around 85 C), different driver versions, and even formated my pc without any luck. I have no idea what the problem is, I called BFG and he said it might just be reporting it wrong since I was not experiencing any artifacts while playing. Even if it is, it is dramatically lowering my performance when I checked my 3dmark05 scores with others; I get around a 3000 score compared to peoples 7000+ scores. 3dMark is also reporting that the core clock is only at 11 mhz ??

My setup:
Dell Dimension 8300
3ghz Pentium 4 Prescott 1meg L2 cache
BFG 6800 GT OC 256 meg DDR3
1gig ram
2x 160gig IDE harddrives
1x SATA -> IDE 160gig harddrive
Pioneer DVDRW
Liteon DVDRom
Audigy 2 platinum
Winfast tv2000xp tv card
Linksys pci 54g wireless card

Could it be a power supply problem or just a bad card?

 

[Tu13erhead]

Did your friend ever remove the stock heatsink?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Tu13erhead
Did your friend ever remove the stock heatsink?

Yeah, sounds like either the GPU fan isn't working properly, or the whole cooler is detached. Remove it, add some good T.I.m make certain it is seated well and try using it again.

 

[ranova]

My friend said he never removed the HSF. If I were to remove it, can I use Arctic silver 5 on it?

 

[ranova]

Also I dont believe its the powersupply. I removed all my optical drives from the power supply to just supply power to the video card and it still runs at the same temperature.

 

[SergeC]

Originally posted by: ranova
Also I dont believe its the powersupply. I removed all my optical drives from the power supply to just supply power to the video card and it still runs at the same temperature.

No, I doubt it would be the PS. Don't fry the card heating it that high anymore, take the heatsink off and reapply it with new TIM (yes, AS5 will work great, just clean off whatever is on there first). Make sure it gets a good physical connection with the core.

 

[Goi]

It's probably a bad connection or a really dusty heatsink. I took off my XFX 6800GT heatsink, cleaned it up and reapplied AS3 on it. My temps dropped ~10C idle and over 20C load.

 

[ranova]

since BFG has lifetime warrenty (<3) I just decided to RMA the card and got a different one back with the new copper heatsink. My old one had the original hSF with the nvidia logo and black heatsink on it. Works great, OCd it to 400/1100 and 60C Idle, 75C load.

I have no problems in all games except FEAR, with fear I can play for 15 min and then I start getting artifacts and freeze. I have to disable overclocking to be artifact free, is this normal? Also, why only with FEAR? (Ive played WoW, Quake 4, CoD2, AoE3, CS:S, Battlefield 2 SF all without trouble)

 

[Big Lar]

FEAR uses a Ton of ram to run, just try running the game in a lower resolution

 

[ranova]

hehe i just beat FEAR, great game, so I no longer have to downclock

 

[Saint Nick]

throw some AS5 on that b!tch and call it good! maybe just resetting the HS/F will do the trick. you could send it to me and i could make you a ridiculous heatpipe mod for it

but in all seriousness, use AS5.