Radeon LE, how hot is too hot?

[Token Joe]

When I play games my radeon LE gets hot to the touch, If I'm just surfing its fine, I figured this was normal since I was stressing the processor during games. I was wondering how hot was too hot and if there is a way to tell what the tempature of the chip is? I clocked it to 166 with stock heat sink, hyper z enabled. Any help would be appreciated, I don't want to fry it, not just yet.

 

[TJ69]

ifu smell something burning, its too hot...

there is no heat sensor on the chip, so u cant get a temp reading. But the chip does get pretty hot during gaming, thats normal. I went over to a local comp store and picked up an old 486/pentium fan, and slapped it on. Little active cooling keeps my mind at ease.

I've run the card for hours at 190 playing serios sam and max payne. It seemed fine to me. The game will probably freeze before the chip burns up, hopefully. Think of it as a safety feature....

 

[Killrose]

I agree wit TJ69, get a fan on it. Then you can clock it much higher, 183-190MHz no problems.

 

[PaveLow]

The Anadtech article about the Radeon LE says that you don't need any additional cooling even if you've got it up to 183 MHz.

 

[The_Lurker]

<< The Anadtech article about the Radeon LE says that you don't need any additional cooling even if you've got it up to 183 MHz. >>


I got mine to 190mhz core w/o any active cooling or any additional cooling. However, i did slap a S370 Coolermaster HS designed for Celemines on it, as well as ramsinks on each chip. What'd it do to my oc's you ask?!?!?! absoultely nothing! Didn't get any extra speed in core and memory. O well, at least it looks cool

 

[Soccerman]

and u can be assured heat won't kill your chips, just the overclock The_Lurker!

I just bought a Radeon LE, flashed the BIOS to Radeon 32 DDR (physically the same board), and so it's running @ 166 with all the hyperZ features enabled. I did a 3DMark 2000 test with the LE and using an overclock of 166mhz and with those hyperZ features enabled using a tweak program, and I got the same score as when I uninstalled the program (testing again before flashing to be sure the effects were removed) and flashed the new BIOS.

anywho, I noticed that even at the default clock the back of the card got pretty warm during gaming, and the heatsink was nice and warm, so I plopped that pentium fan on, and the heatsink is much cooler now (the back was still warm though).

after the overclock it's not much hotter on the back, but I don't feel comfortable overclocking anything without extra cooling, and I don't want to overclock the RAM (it's rated at 166!).