9800 GX2 Drivers / Temperature

I just recently completed the build of my new computer. It contains a Quad Core Intel, 8gigs of DDR2, 9800GX2, and Vista 64 bit edition.

So far Ive only ran into one problem. On two separate occasions I played Crysis and Team Fortress 2, both crashed out to a bluescreen. I have the dumps and the logs but I cant get the exact readout of the blue screen till the next time it occurs.

Now the weird thing is, when TF2 crashed, it crashed within 5-10 minutes of starting, then it ran fine for an hour. Crysis crashed within 20 minutes of gameplay. Both blue screens looked very similar and it looked like a Nvidia file caused a fault. Now the question is rather this is a overheating issue or a driver issue. Both games crashed when there was alot of action on screen. No artifacting occurred though. Both screens just froze, the sound stuttered on the same sound, and it finally the screen went black and then to the blue screen where it dumped and restarted.

My gut says its a driver issue but my mind is saying temperature. I grabbed EVGA prcecision to see my temperatures and both cores were about 55C on idle and this was at about 25% fan speed, when I force 100% fan it idles at around 43C. Any ideas?

those temps seem fine, once, on accident I had my fan set at 75% and I was playing COD4 for about 2 hours, then I started to get artifacts, so I looked in the top right of my screen and saw both my GPU's near 100C! So I quickly set the fan speed to 100%. My point is, I don't believe temperature will make you crash, most likely u will see artifacts before that happens. Try a different driver and see if that helps, also do the usual HDD defrag and make sure your Motherboard has an updated Bios, I have heard that some mobos have had problems identifying the GX2 properly without a bios update. Goodluck

Don't trust Windows Exp Rating, its been torturing me for a while.

Your card's temps seem to be fine, as for the BSOD, it can be from your ram being under powered. Check the ram sticks and see what voltage they are supposed to be running at and manual change it to that.

Are your ram sticks all the same?

Either way see if your CPU is oced

My 8800GT gets 5.9 on the Exp Rating, yours should be 5.9 too, since 5.9 is the max. Anyways, it's an error, it's not a very good benchmark BTW. Make sure your PSU has the required amps to run your 9800GX2.

The power supply I have is on the supported Nvidia website.

Antec Quattro TPQ-850
http://www.nvidia.com/object/gefor [...] upply.html

I ran the memory test for about 10minutes, in my experience the errors come up pretty fast, I got nothing so far. But ill do a full test later tonight.

How bout my temps
Just updated my pc to:
Intel C2Q Q9550 @ 2.83ghz
4gigs ddrII/800
evga 9800 gx2
evga nforce 780i Sli
and psu I hav is corsair 650tx

idle temps at ~72-73*C
and fan is 57% auto
factory clocks too