Upgrading cooling for 7800 GTX 490GPU 1300Memory

[Cyclops21]

Hello, I recently purchased another 7800GTX card for my computer and since then my games are crashing more often. Games typically run fine for an hour or two then will lock up the computer. Oblivian can crash faster then other games.

I thought it may be a driver problem but I have used the drivers XFX has and the last two versions from Nvida, no changes with any of the drivers.

I ran Prime95 for about 8 hours and it worked just fine and my CPU doesn't get hotter then ~54C.

I then monitered my video card temp and it seems to idle @ 62C and goes as high as ~87C. I know other have said video cards run hotter then CPUs but this seems to hot to me. The Nvidia control panel says 115C is the treshold but close to 90C just seems to high.

So does it lok like I have a problem with my video cards getting to hot now with SLI? Should I upgrade the cooling on them? If so what is recommended?

Thanks.

 

[4Ryan6]

First of all I have 2 MSI 7800GTX so before you spent the money on an upgrade to after market cooling I'd get some Artic Silver 5 Thermal compound put my hardware tweaking hat on, pull the stock cooler and check its contact points out to make sure its making good contact with the GPU and MEM, when you pull it you'll be able to see where its contact problems are, then clean her up and tweak a bend here, or there, on the heatsink and some sanding if you discover areas on the heatsink itself the need attention to get the thing to sit perfectly flat.

Using a good light will allow you to see if contact is not being made in some places, then using cheap thermal compound that we all usually have laying around do a trial fit with the new adjustments, pull the heatsink back off and see if your tweaking closed all the nonfitting areas, if so clean her up apply AS5 and slap her back together, if not tweak some more until you get good even fit of the heatsink across all its territory.

Once you get the stock heatsink to fully make good contact your temps should drop, especially with the added Artic Silver 5, you can expect to spend at least 30min on a card, you'll probably be surprised at the ineffifiency of the heatsink contact, but the manufacturer cannot spend 30min per card tweaking its contact points.

If you tweak your stock cards and don't get better cooling performance then consider an aftermarket cooling solution, but stay away from the Artic Cooling AcceleroX1, my stock cards cooled better than that piece of junk.