What is too hot for a Video card?

[jflongo]

I've always had the rule of thumb trying to stay under 50 degrees celcius for CPU's. Around 60 degrees and higher on my AMD CPU's has always been about the breaking point, so 50 and less has been a good number to shoot for.

I recently bought a NVidia 8800GTS 320MB Card. When running the NVidia MonitorView program, I notice that the GPU under minor load hovers around 59 degrees Celcius. I haven't had a chance to watch it much yet under games.

What is too hot?

This is the one I have, and it comes slightly overclocked from the manufacturer.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130038

 

[kaotao]

Under 80C you've got nothing to worry about. I've even seen some cards run fine in the 90s.

 

[aziraphale]

Some won't even stop until they get to the 105ish range. But that won't do any good for their life expectancy. I'd say everything under 80C is tolerable.

 

[jflongo]

Ok thanks

 

[jflongo]

So far I have overclocked my 8800 GTS 320MB card to 580 Mhz / 1800 Mhz and it's a little over 70 degrees Celcius. So I'm actually approaching some 8800 GTX card speeds and still under 80 degrees

 

[lostandwandering]

Actually, from what I have seen the temperature thresholds for most cards is usually set to around 120C. My GeForce 6800 is set to 125C but it has never gotten hotter than 75C and that's in a crappy Dell case. I say as long as you are under 100C you are fine. If you get higher than that become concerned.

The thing with temps is that they will always change from user to user since not everyone will have the same case set-up. Guy X will have 3 120mm fans and never get above 60C, but guy y only has one and may see his get to 90. Your temps are all relative to how well your case is cooled and not to how hot other peoples cards get.

 

[jflongo]

I have a very nice case would good airflow. In fact, I just ran 3DMark06 and watched the temp, it hovered around 69 degrees celcius the whole time. I'm planning on putting 1 more fan in my case too, that should help a bit as well.

 

[skyguy]

Use RivaTuner, manually set the GPU fan to 80%....best balance between performance and noise. Temps should improve even more.

 

[toxxx]

just played CoD WaW for 2 hours, with rivatuners hardware monitoring in the background.
65 c was max temp at 621/1800 on an x1950xt if that is any indication that i could go faster or higher with out second thought

 

[Guest]

My 3, ATI HD 3870 cards (on crossfire), hover around 70 to 80 degrees C after about 2 hours of moderate gameplay. This should be o.k, since each card has it's own fan.

Also, try keeping a window open and don't restrict the fan vents on you pc case. Another thing, is that if you get lots of dust in your computer, a lot of heat can build up!

Once I had crossfire on when one of the cards didn't have a fan and the heat went up to 120 degrees C. Luckily, I disabled crossfire after 10 minutes and the card is fine.