Right, so I was mucking about in my nVidia control panel settings, and noticed that my GTX 660 Ti had defaulted itself to running in "multiple display performance mode." I only run a single monitor for work and gaming, so I changed the setting back to "single monitor performance mode," and noticed two things:
The first was a startling jump in FPS in Far Cry 3; the game had always run well (at near-max specs; some of the AA was turned down because I just can't see the difference between low AA and high AA), but now it was clipping along at a much smoother frame rate.
The second thing was that my card temps under load were suddenly higher; FC 3 only raised my card to about 58 C even in high-intensity situations--now it's up around 63-64. I know that's still a relatively safe temperature, but the spike worries me.
I'm relatively new to working with gaming-quality graphics cards (my brother-in-law helped me build my current PC about a year ago), so I'm not sure if this is normal or not. Any help or insight would be much appreciated.
As a side question, is it safe to keep the card running in the mid-60 C range for an hour or more? I came from console gaming, and had a couple of XBox 360's die on me--I'd prefer not to torch my card, as EVGA 660 Ti's are getting hard to find over at Newegg, and while I'm considering stepping up to a 770 or 780, I'd rather not have that decision forced on me early by blowing out my card.
Relevant PC specs below:
i5 3570k @ 3.40 GHz
16 GB GDDR 5 RAM
EVGA GTX 660 Ti 2 GB
Rosewill 750 W PSU
The first was a startling jump in FPS in Far Cry 3; the game had always run well (at near-max specs; some of the AA was turned down because I just can't see the difference between low AA and high AA), but now it was clipping along at a much smoother frame rate.
The second thing was that my card temps under load were suddenly higher; FC 3 only raised my card to about 58 C even in high-intensity situations--now it's up around 63-64. I know that's still a relatively safe temperature, but the spike worries me.
I'm relatively new to working with gaming-quality graphics cards (my brother-in-law helped me build my current PC about a year ago), so I'm not sure if this is normal or not. Any help or insight would be much appreciated.
As a side question, is it safe to keep the card running in the mid-60 C range for an hour or more? I came from console gaming, and had a couple of XBox 360's die on me--I'd prefer not to torch my card, as EVGA 660 Ti's are getting hard to find over at Newegg, and while I'm considering stepping up to a 770 or 780, I'd rather not have that decision forced on me early by blowing out my card.
Relevant PC specs below:
i5 3570k @ 3.40 GHz
16 GB GDDR 5 RAM
EVGA GTX 660 Ti 2 GB
Rosewill 750 W PSU
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram