Hi to you all and thanks in advance for any advice.

I have a galaxy 7900gs with a Zalman fan on it and am trying to push it a little in preparation for the Crysis release until i can afford a new card.
It came out the box with a 500 core clock speed and 750 memory clock speed and i bumped it up to 550/800 with Riva. Now i live in Thailand so i know the ambient temp is going to be higher to start with but under load i'm getting readings of about 68 sometimes even 71c.
Is this too hot or do i have to knock some off like you do with TAT core temp readings?
What do you think, ok too hot?

Cheers,
Marcus.

It is hot but not too hot....gpu can take a lot more heat than cpu.

Be sure to have a good air flow thru your case

My x1950pro oc is 80+ on heavy loads....

those temperatures are fine, overclocking doesnt really effect the core temp of nvidia cards too much

try running it on stock and see the temps after heavy gaming

the video cards can usually handle up to around 90-100C with out getting killed but i wouldn't want anything over 80C

(some older cards can even go up to 150C with out getting killed (my friend tried it with a old ati card that didn't work right, he disconnected the fan than ran aqua mark over and over and the card wouldn't die even after the textures began to become checkered and purple)

video cards usually are able to handle more that than CPU's

make sure you have at least some direct airflow going across the videocard or a pocket of how air will form under the videocard since all videocard companies thought it was smart to put the heatsink on the bottom of the card knowing that heat rises

a pci slot cooler or a fan on the side panel of the case blowing at the videocard will really lower the temps

PS when overclocking your card, first keep the memory at stock, then overclock about 50 MHz then after that game for a few minutes, then close the game, increase the overclock by 10MHz then game again, (using the hardware monitor in rivatuner, keep check the temp after playing the game,

repeat these steps until you start seeing distortions, then bring down the overclock a bit until theres 100% no distortions

after that begin to increase the memory clock speed from your 800MHz, to 810MHz, then test the game for distortion then go to 820 and test again, do this until you see distortions then turn it back by 20MHz from where you had the distortion

Nice one for the info it's helped loads and relieved some fears.
Cheers.