Overheating issues on my Gforce 6800 256 GT

[Xeoneex]

So I like to play games, on some I dual box, AKA run 2 games on my system at the same time. Well I noticed my temp was 100 deg C even higher at times. Cuasing my system to lock up and/or reboot on its own. I bought a fan that fits in the PCI slot under the card to draw the heat from the fan on the card to the outside of the rear of the computer. I dont have the money really to invest in a liquid cooling system and I was wondering if underclocking it slightly would have any results? I did overclock it with Nvidia's utility that overclocked it within safe perimeters. However I cannot run the program on my system now becuase i run Winx XP 64 bit and the program isnt supported for the 64 edition. So my question is, how can I, without spending alot of money, get myoverall heat down?

 

[Ricemarine]

How many fans are in your case?...

Nvsilencer 5 rev. 3 or 2's might help since it directly exhaust the air...

But 100 C? D00D wouldn't the core start molding? But that's really high, althought 6-series usually go around 60's-80's

 

[Xeoneex]

I have about 5 fans in my system with a side window which I completely have taken off as of like a month ago. The core starts getting critical at 120+. As I said I overclocked it awhile ago and maybe I shouldn't have. I think I can manually lower the core Freq, but I dont know how all taht works and I've heard things like even turning down the freq can cause dmg or something. I just need some professional advice about that before I attempt it.

 

[SynthDude2001]

What brand? And is it AGP or PCI-E (not that I think it matters)?

For what it's worth, I had exactly the same problem a month or two back (I have an AGP 6800GT). Temps would easily hit 100-105°C under heavy load, and all sorts of artifacts and crashes happened as a result. What I did was remove the heatsink, remove the thermal material that was already there (which had gotten pretty nasty after a year and a half), cleaned all surfaces very well with isopropyl alcohol, and apply some AS5 and put the heatsink back on. Now my load temps are at most 90C, and I get no more artifacts or crashes. (That still sounds high, but as mentioned above, 6-series cards run very hot to begin with, plus I have my GT running at Ultra speeds...as long as it runs stably with no artifacting/crashing, I'm not going to lose sleep over it)

Let me know if you need more specific instructions...

 

[Xeoneex]

Well heres the thing, I play Shadowbane, I run 2 accounts on my 1 PC. Granted the game is somewhat buggy, I get random freezes, or i think they are called hangups, that eventually go away. Sometimes I just out of nowhere my system will just reboot. Its not very often, though its happening more and more lately. if I run a fan on it it will maintain around 91-95. If i dont it can easily get to 110-115. this card IS a bit overclocked as I said, if I can somehow underclock it to what it was originally I think I can cool it off slightly but it might just need cleaning as you stated. I'll have to do that and get back to you.

 

[Xeoneex]

So just a recap here, my card still seems to be heating up if i dont have a huge window fan blowing on it. I am trying to find a way to underclock it or do something to it other than spending mounds of money putting in a cooling system, cuase I heard those were expensive and a pain in the butt to install anyway, to get my gforce 6800 card's temp down from a max of around 112-115 down to 80-90 and maintain it without having to have a fan blowing inside my computer.

 

[Markbnj]

I never had temps quite that high with my 6800GT, but when I first built my current system it would get into the low 70's when running BF2, etc. I installed an Arctic NV Silencer and the card now loads up to 53c or so.

Highly recommend the Silencer line, since it directly cools the GPU, is quiet, and exhaust the air out the rear of the case.

 

[Xeoneex]

I'll have to look into that thanks!

 

[zagood]

You've got enough fans for airflow, consider a zalman vf700 also. Or, if you can afford it, the new vf900.

You can move either of those to a new video card if/when you get one. You can't with the silencer.

-z

 

[hmorphone]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

What I did was remove the heatsink, remove the thermal material that was already there (which had gotten pretty nasty after a year and a half), cleaned all surfaces very well with isopropyl alcohol, and apply some AS5 and put the heatsink back on

That might help almost as much as a new heatsink if you're low on funds.