A few months ago i wiped my harddrive and re-installed all my drivers, i got the newest display drivers for
my card.
about a week ago i sarted a new char named steel_tounge and made him a freelancer, flying around in a starblazer. then FL started freezing for about 15-30 seconds and i could'nt play any videos, so i re-installed my drivers and now my GPU overheats, it says it overheats up to 60 degrees celcius! i can certainly feel that it is overheating and when i play FL i get lot of artifacts (not the cargo artifacts, the graphic glitch artifacts!)
so i got out all the dust and it still overheats, my brother says it could be the heat sink being loose off the card and says thermal paste could fix it, but i dont know what t is, where i get it , how i use it, but i REALLY cannoth afford a new card.
any suggestions? right now i use my desk fan to keep my comp cool at 55 degrees without games, only browsing.
But thermal past is like tooth paste that transfers heat from the processing unit to that big block of metal to be extracted by the fan (called a heatsink)
In some cases the fan pulls cool air onto the heatsink and if there is hot air in the case, then you won't be getting anywhere causing the computer to overheat.
I would think either the heatsink is loose, or your card has done its dash. I had a card like that, that recently went up in a ball of smoke. If you see further symptoms like:
-Music playing funny
-discolouration on your monitor
-random slow downs and crashes
-random insta-crashes on windows boot
-verticle/horizontal lines (that flicker on and off)
Do you have another card you can thow in to test? That would be helpful.:)
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
Its most likely overheating problem. I had 6600GT and never had such problems. However, 60 degrees isn't much for graphic card.
If u can open the case of your computer and check cards cooling system. Jiggle it a bit to see if its firmly on the card. It also good to check how fan is working (if works at all) and how much dust it has on it. In most cases dust is to blame for cooling issues. If u have dust, vacuum clear is your friend, just be careful not to pull in some parts:P.
Also...you should use older drivers for your GC...not the latest ones...sometimes support for old cards in new drivers isnt the best.
Occasionally an older computer motherboard can't automatically configure the voltage for a card and may apply to much or to little (rare this is).
This means sometimes an 8x agp card must run at only 4x. Don't know what rig you have but if its older, take down the AGP setting in BIOS or with your NVIDIA control panel.
Otherwise I would agree its a bad heatsink or a card sandwiched too close to other "hot" cards in your pc and without enough ventilation.
If dust is really bad in your case, turn off the power and unplug it and blow it out. Make sure no water sprays from the can and its dry before you turn it back on. Slight chance can be an airflow problem but I'd guess baad heatsink or cooked gpu.
Hm, my old computer was overheating badly as well, really badly, I've took the hardware half-way out from the box, to be on "cool air" and added like 3 bonus fans.My graphis card had 1 Big fan, 1 small and one alluminium cooling and it was still burning when I run newer games.
But the solution is quite easy, save your moey and buy a new one, even second hand maybe, otherwise you may see your computer being turnned into to fireball pretty soon. A lot of cards start to overheat, reason 1- They are too old, and they already want to die, or 2- they were made with a mistake somewhere and it's just about time till they end up in fire and smoke, which usually happens 2 years after you buy them.
Save you money,
Elvin
I buy things I don't want to make an impression on people I don't like.
Having 6600 myself, and it was overheating. Its mostly due to its fan being too small to support long time work, so i bouhgt new, Zalman fan and replaced old one with it. Works like charm since.