Overheating problems

I own the XFX GeForce 6800GS card, and have owned it for one or two years. It came factory overclocked to 485 MHz, and the memory is supposedly clocked at 550 Mhz. I assume this is standard, but the tweaked Nvidia drivers that allow for overclocking show the memory clock at 2.20 GHz.

Anyhoo, I bought it for use in a pretty nice Dell (at the time). Since then I have built a new system and used this card. It has never been very cool, and in the new system I used to just keep it under 85 degrees Celsius. However, at one point recently the temperatures skyrocketed to 117 degrees Celsius. I turned my system off immediately, and pressed the heatsink tight to the card. The temperatures were fine after that, but there is a possibility I damaged my card.

More recently, I downloaded tweaked drivers for the card. I looked at the overclocking feature, and then pressed the button that finds recommended speed, which was probably a very bad idea. It went up to around 525 core clock, and 2.5 GHz memory clock. I tried a game, and it hit my self-imposed limit of 85 Celsius almost immediately. I returned it to default clock speeds and installed the regular Nvidia drivers. However, ever since that moment it has hit 85 Celsius within an hour of playing any game. The tweaked drivers make it get there even faster.

So I figured that I permanently did something damaging, and tried underclocking to reduce heat. However, that made the card overheat even faster, within 15 minutes of playing a game. The underclocked speeds were 456 core and 2.06 memory.

Is my card just dying? Did I kill it? Is there anything I can do? I really don't want to buy another, because my upgrade will be to a DX10 card, and I'm waiting for prices to drop.

Thanks!

Well from what I've heard 85 is really high. The slowdown is set to 125 C, but I can't change it, and I figured that that was way too high. Idle system temp is 43/44, but it goes to 55/58 under load.

Actually, I didn't like it when the heat gets above 75C which is why I changed over to water cooling.

It's not a matter of what it's designed for but just good card maintenance. Keeping the temperatures down will extend the life of the card and reduce any chances of breakdown.

Not sure what you did wrong but I'm assuming here that your fan is running ok still? maybe try an aftermarket fan or just reseat yours. If you noticed that it was not in good contact before then you may have lost the good seal that the thermal paste had between the gpu and heatsink.

Get some arctic silver 5 and remove the old paste, reapply and reseat the heatsink making sure there is good contact.

The way you said that you pressed on the heatsink and your tempsdropped,tells me thats it might need to be tightened.Takeit off and clean it really good,and use your articsilver 5.Also blow ourt any kind of crap thart you might see.I'm running two OCed 8800GTS's,and even after 6 hours of gaming my temps are at 60c. Make sure your case has good air flow.If you have a side panel that allows you to add a fan,try a Mechatronics 120cm AC PC fan. I run them in each of my cases,and they have made a really big change in my temps all around.You can find them at www.coolerguys.com for $19.95 thier 80cm AC fans run $18.95 and both are very quite. You should also think abouty replacing your VGA fan with a Zalman, or just buy a 8800GTS.I really dont see them dropping below $399.00