To try and RMA, or get an NV silencer to solve my problems?

[BobDaMenkey]

I've had this card for quite some time now, in fact, almost as long as I've been registered here, because I joined because of issues with this card. In any event.

The card works just fine for the most part. It'll play The Sims 2, it'll play Day of Defeat or Counter Strike Source just happily fine all day long without issue. However if I fire up EvE-Online (My favorite undergoundish MMO) or The Movies (With Expansion, or without), the games will freeze the card up. By freeze it up, I mean make the entire screen nothing but artifacts. I'm running the most recent drivers for it, and I have never overclocked the card. The ONLY thing I have done, was originally remove the HSF, to put some AS5 on the core, which dropped core temps by about 5*C IIRC, so it didn't fail.

The card had been working wonderfully since I finally got a working one after going through 2 or 3 bum ones. The first one I got would produce artifacts in Windows, the second one produced artifacts on POSTing. This one had been working just fine until a few months ago when this problem started to happen. I've taken steps to make sure the case is better ventilated, but it's still doing this to me.

So should I try RMAing the card, AGAIN, or go for some alternatives to try and cool it down? I think it's crashing because it's overheating, hence my idea for an NV5, or maybe one of those PCI slot coolers...

What say you AT?

 

[Unkno]

you sure it's overheating? Two possible solutions to test it: 1. open up the case while gaming and see if it overheats. 2. Run another REALLY stressful program/game and see if it overheats, that way, you'll know it's not the two games listed above that's causing the problem. Try rthdribl and 3DMark06

 

[BobDaMenkey]

I'm running rthdribl right now. The temp is hanging around 72*C (during scene switches) to 77*C. CPU is also being held under full load thanks to F@H, at 47*C.

Also, I've never had problems with my laptop locking up while playing EvE-Online. It's running a 6800Go, which is similar enough to the 6800GT for comparison.

Given that the problem occured with more than one game I figured it'd be the card to blame.

I don't know what kind of temperatures those games have put it at though, as I always game full screen. I do know that when hanging about inside a station, the temps are much higher than in space in EvE-Online. I might hook up my second monitor to watch temps before the computer freezes again.