How hot should my GeForce4 4400 card be?

[SomethingBurning]

Newbie to the Nivia card market here so be gentle. I have a new rig Gigabyte 7vxrp with AMD XP1800 and I put a Gainward GeForce4400 in it. The first video card was bad, supposedly a bad batch of memory. Now I have the second one in there. It has been working OK, I tried a quick overclock a little and IL2 froze up so I am back to safe speeds, but while playing noticed a lot of heat coming from the box (literally rising up from under the desk and making me hot). Only the Power supply fan, CPU fan, and GPU fan are in the case (I checked and they are all running). I took the cover off and felt the CPU heatsink, it was hotter than when I was running a different video card in it (Voodoo5 and Diamond ViperII), but the video card is under the CPU so that might make the heatsink hotter, right? I put my finger on the memory heatsink on the video card and it was quite hot (I didn't leave my finger on too long). My question is, is this right? I don't have any fancy measuring devices so it has to be done the old fasion way, sorry. Just curious what to be expecting. Note the system seems to be running fine right now (nothing overclocked).

 

[Deskstar]

First question is that the 4400-4600s run quite hot, almost too hot to touch. Secondly, you should be able to safely overclock to some extent. By the way, I don't know how the Gainward heatsinks are attached, but often they are simply kept on with a glob of thermal epoxy or piece of thermal tape, not very efficient temperature conduction.

 

[SomethingBurning]

Just wanted to bump this to the top as of late the system seems to randomly freeze up now. Don't know if it is heat related or maybe the P/S not giving enough juice or what. Can anyone provide some guidance as to how hot this card should get?

 

[dude]

Don't know about the randomly freezing. If you want answers, you have to provide some more info!

The Gainward 4400 uses thermal tape to hold in the memory heatsinks. At least on mines it does.

 

[SomethingBurning]

Well, I was finally able to measure the temperature and the hottest spot that I could find was 121F/49C on a Video RAM Heatsink. Still getting lockup now and have been working the route that I have been reading about with the PSU not being good. Mine is a Sparkle 300W. I have moved the M/B RAM to DIMM Slot 3 and moved any PCI cards away from the AGP slot, try to free up Power for the AGP slot. Nothing seemed to help and then I tried the VCore setting in BIOS, changed it to 7% range, don't know what this is exactly doing for me though, so would love some details and now it seems to be working OK.

 

[J3anyus]

Only the Power supply fan, CPU fan, and GPU fan are in the case

And there's your problem. Get some case fans if you're going to be running new hardware like that. At absolute minimum, get yourself an exhaust fan. Preferably, get at least one intake and one exhaust. If your case doesn't have mounts for fans, buy a new case. Your rig is generating way too much heat to run without case fans.