sovereign110

Distinguished
Jan 20, 2010
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I recently had a GeForce 8800GTX die on me, presumably because it kept overheating and eventually the card got damaged somehow. I borrowed a 6800 from a friend and I'm using that now, and a new card is on the way. My question is, how do I prevent the same thing from happening to the new card?

The airflow in my case is fine, especially since I took the side panel off and set a fan up right next to it, blowing in on the card. That seemed to work for awhile, until I started gaming one day and 5 minutes into the session the card seemed to have died. I still had video in safe mode, though it was a bit garbled. I checked the temps of some other components in the BIOS to see if the overheating wasn't restricted to the video card, and this is what I got (No gaming was done, it was basically just staring at the BIOS screen):

CPU: 40c
Board: 27c
MCP: 70c (Gradually went from 65-70 after a few minutes in the BIOS)

That third temperature seems a bit high. I have an nForce 680i chipset, if it matters. The biggest problem I have is that I didn't seem to do anything wrong; the card just died on its own, and I don't know how to prevent my new card from failing as well.
 

vvhocare5

Distinguished
Mar 5, 2008
768
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19,060
Unfortunately thats how these things go.

I bought 2 Nvidia somethings about 5 years ago - one popped every cap on the PCB and dies after 5 years, the other is running fine in a worse case.
ATI 4870x2 one year old, just stopped. Went to sleep but would not wake up. Fault LEDS were lit up and Gigabyte replaced it - no obviuos issues other than the VRMs ran too hot.

As I recall the 8800's had a manufacturing defect in the GPU. They had accelerated failures if I remember the model is correct.

That Gigabyte card had a three year warranty. They were great about replacing it. No issues...