Evga 9800gt overheating

So here is the story...

My case doesn't have the side panel and I stretch my legs while I am playing some WoW and made slight contact with my card with one of my toes and noticed it was pretty freaking hot.

So I open up my Nividia control panel and go look at the gpu settings and see that my card is running at a reported 98c with fanspeed set to 30% !!!! So I close up WoW, and boost my fanspeed to let the temp stabalize back to its usual 57-60c and lower the clock speeds on the control panel (thought my novice knowledge doesn't know if it does this on the fly, or if I need to reboot to set it in).


This fanspeed thing has been a problem with the control panel. Every time I reboot the manual set 100% drops to 30%. I have tried saving profiles to load up upon reboot, but only the fanspeed won't save. If I keep the control panel to auto speed, it always adjust the speed to keep the temp to save at mid 70's with the fanspeed never exceeding more than a 70% load.


So anyways back to the 98c thing. It had been a couple days since I rebooted, so I have probably been running at this 30% fan speed for a couple days, keeping my temps way high.

My card still appears to be fine. I ran some stability tests, played some more wow, watched videos, etc. No problems reported or seen.

However I have yet to shut down or reboot.


So my questions are this.

1) Do you think my card will continue to run properly if I rebooted/shut down ? I am worried that it will be like a sever head trauma and will cease to work if it let it sleep.

2) Do you think that the problems may occur later ?

3) Does anyone know how I can get that blasted nvidia control panel to save my fanspeed settings to 100%.

Negative on the OC.

My room is pretty warm in the first place usually.

and thanks for the link and info about it being able to operate under that temp.