I just bought my first ever graphics card. I have an old computer. Dell E310, with P4 clocked at 3.0. I have 2 GB ram. I just put in a nvidia 6200 with the PCI interface, I was messing around looking at everest, and I was watching the GPU tempuratures and I was curious what is too hot? What is normal, etc etc. The case has pretty good space, It's not crowded or anything. I dont stress anything too much. I keep games at low cause right now I'm more concerned about it running smoothly and playing correctly than how good it looks.

Also a question not related to thread. When I turn AA on in Hellgate, it makes it smoother, and the fps doesn't plummit (it goes down yes) but it stays pretty steady, what I notice is that there is a lag where when I move my mouse, it seems like what shows up on screen is behind what I'm doing. Any way to stop this besides turning AA off? It does it on low or medium..

People are going to have to comb through the dusty corners of there mind to give you an answer, i would say anything over 70 celcius, but i could be wrong.

I don't think a 6200 would be extremely hot since it is a low end card. I know I've heard of over 80C for old ati x19xx cards and possibly the 7800gtx cards, but anything over 70c needs to be checked.

if it has a fan on the heatsink, you will probably have lower temps when compared to a silent, no fan gpu heatsink.

As far as hellgate goes, That is a modern game. Your gpu is at least two generations old so I wouldn't expect good performance even on low settings. I haven't personally played the game, but I'm quite sure that you're gonna have low performance with that 6200.

Alright thanks guys, that sounds good. I was just asking in a very general sense but I suppose each card is differant. I am not expecting high performance, somehow the game ran on my integrated graphics and very rarely was unplayeable except with the most monsters, I am very happy with what the 6200 did, and I can't wait to put my new computer together with much more modern components.
Thanks.

If you ran it on integrated, you might be seeing the stuttering performance because of the DirectX level. I had the same issue when I upgraded from a mx420 64mb to an x800gto. Half life 2 had lowerframerates, but that was because of the difference in the card's DirectX level.
I just looked up the requirements. I'm surprised that your integrated graphics even ran it.

BTW, is hellgate a fun game to play? I had liked it when it was first rumored, but I didn't know it was an mmorpg.