It is that time of the year again

So you know how much I love listening to Cleaner swear each time I kill him. Last
Christmas I swapped my 9600GT made by Palit with 10cm fan for a passively cooled 9600GT made by Gigabyte and I felt reborn with my earcanals finally freed from that constant small fan noise.



Everything was fine until last two weeks when my game started freezing. Maybe I have to add that we had a rather cold spring with a short snowfall in the beginning of May, temperatures started rising only recently. So my screen would go black for a moment, after that I get a system message stating that my video drivers stopped responding or something like that. After each such crash I would open speedfan (which takes some time) and see the temperature of the GPU going down from 65 degrees. Now when I first started using the mew gpu it was on 40 or less when idle, so I thought 65 is ok, it is good that I have such protection mechanisms like freezing video drivers so my card doesn't fry.

But I didn't want to leave things like that so I added speedfan to my startup and started watching it closely.
Today I reached 80 degrees (eighty!) with my case open and it didn't crash!
And it is just 25 outside! In July/August it can get up to 32-35 here so I need a plan!
Buying a new video card is out of the question fir now, so I need some low-cost solutions.
I was thinking about strapping a 12 cm fan to the heatsink (somethink like this ) but I am no sure it will hold tight or that my heatsink is big enough.
Anyone got any smart ideas?

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1. Remove all the sides from your case, lie it flat with motherboard lowest. Place on a brick or something so its off the floor so the air can circulate. Ensure you stop any major dust build up. Tidy any wiring away from the GPU.

2. Use a large house fan blowing air at the case, large fans are much more quiet than small fans. Keeping you cool too for when I dominate you

3. In game, stay off the roof.

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"Sincerely, and go fuck yourself;

You need to have the air moving over the heatsink. Having your case open will not help that at all, it will probably make it worse cause your chassi fans at the back will not move air through the chassi as intended. So good chassi ventilation is very important!

Strapping a fan on it will help alot, and in that case it will probably help having the chassi open!


On a side note, The freezing you experience is probably caused by poor programming on valves part cause I have the same problem. Stuttering, black screens, looping sounds is all a part of the TF2 experience!


Download FurMark to test the stability. If you don't have any problems running this you are completely safe! (I take no responsibility if you fry the card with this program )
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/

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ErnoT

First of all get a 10l bucket and fill halfway with ice. Then pour over the ice enough antifreeze to fill the bucket. Give that a good stir with a stick.

Take the side off your case and lie it flat on the floor. Make sure the power supply is not plugged into the wall. Pour the entire contents of the bucket into the PC, making sure you get everything covered in antifreeze and ice. Then sit back and enjoy

N

p.s. I'd probably try Daz's or ErnoT's methods first

I would just strap the largest fan you can to it. Then hook the fan up to a fan controller. Turn the fan down when not gaming and it should be silent. You may find you only need it 50% when gaming, that would probably also be silent.

This is cheap and effective: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/akasa-ak ... b-20-ports

Clean the case and have a fan at the front bottom and one at the top back if possible. Hook those up to the controller too.

You might be right Ernot.
I am not sure if the problem is that I started the game again before it cooled down below 64, but it damn reached 105 without crashing which is really weird. I am not going to play the game until I get this fixed.
At start the gpu was at 38 degrees, in less than 5 minutes it reached 50 (in idle) .... something is really wrong here, and it ain't dust between the fins.

Update: It appears Dazman's layout is pretty shit. Don't know why I listened to a sniper-whore about a layout of something that isn't spawn. I checked with eventviewer - it took it 7 minutes and a half to raise temperature with 14 degrees. I waited for 20 or so minutes and tried again. Now the case is closed and is up right again for like 13 minutes and it is still at 48 (it stabilised at 49 now). After giving it some consideration I will probably put the fan on the side panel by the holes for the gpu, as its heatsink is 9 cm wide.

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I'm not convinced that heat is the problem here.. 80 degrees isn't excessively hot from my experience and most Nvidia cards 'should' run over 90 without issues, although not recommended!!! I dont think you should start hitting temp issues/failures till u get over 100 degrees. As the first and most usual thing to check is driver version and stability of the driver, check forums for driver version issues. Sometimes older drivers are more stable! You could load up Nvidia tools/overclock and try benchmark tests too. Depending on your driver you should be able to set performance to reliability mode which obviously wont solve the problem but it will give you an indication of weather it's the card or driver rather than the game or platform. If you can run a benchmark test to max out the load on the GPU you should see temp rise with Speedfan. If the card remains stable under load/high temp then u can rule out temp as the fault. If card fails under benchmark and you've tried other drivers then my guess is you may have a faulty card. We've had plenty of cards that have failed in a metter of weeks and sometimes DOA/out of the box. My personal advice is to go for GPU cards from good/recommended manufacturers as the build quality can vary largely and the last thing you want is a high end GPU on a poorly manufactured board which in this case might be components such as heatsink and or fan.
If that doesn't help I'd try Quasi's 'solution'

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Some days it aint worth gnawing through the straps

In the past i'd had the same issues with my aftermarket passive heatpipe cooling from zalman. Roomtemperature was arround 27 degrees and the gfx card temps raised up to +90 degrees in games.

First thing i did do was reïnstalling the passive coolingblock with descent thermal paste on the gpu (arctic silver 5), then i installed an extra casefan in the sidepanel and installed new drivers -> problem solved.

But first things first .... like sponge said .... do some tests.

My current gfx card (ATI 4870X2) has even some burnmarks on it (sticker is brown from heat) but i think that's my own fault cause i did overclock the card, till a few weeks ago, close to max for almost 3 years Now i tweaked it back down to standard clocks and raised fanspeed in the control center. Coretemps are finally falling back to a reasonable 60 degrees (remember this is a dual gpu card) for normal work and about 85 degrees when gaming (before 70 and up to 105)

Luckely for me this card wont have to last any long now cause i bought a new computer that will be up and running somewhere next week. This time, for the first time in my computing history, i did not make any compromises to cooling solutions so i bought a high-end fulltower case (Lian Li PCA77FB) with standard 6 low noise casefans (3 intakes in front, 1 rear and 2 top outtake) with a few more options for cooling (i can replace sidepanel to one with mountings for fans or choose for watercooling in the future)

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Air cooling in a hot room will always be difficult. Blowing hot air over a hot GPU. Small fans will just circulate the warm air thats around the case.

Im just a sniper whore but small fans suck Get the cooler air from around the room.

At normal room temps thats a different matter


Agree with Sponge on GPU temp.

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"Sincerely, and go fuck yourself;

Holy shit beemer that's an expensive case, nice

It seems like it is a problem with tf2. I did that furry donut test and it didn't freeze or crash. Nevertheless I installed a new 120 mm fan on the side panel, keeps the temps low enough, but tf2 still got that "video driver stopped responding" message. Although this time it went black for a shorter period of time.
Going to update drivers now and see if that helps.

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I went through a phase of the video driver stopped responding thing. It's a Nvidia issue I think, I remember Cat also getting it a bit. I was running a 8800gt at the time, but that died a few weeks ago . I slapped in a cheapish gts450 and so far so good on the latest whql driver.

I know but a descent case will last for several builds eh.

- First case was a white Aopen H600 middle tower -> to small for upgrades and white ... bah
- Second case was a black chieftec fulltower with 80mm fans -> to little airflow and loud
- Current Gigabyte Aurora has only 1X120mm intake and 2X120mm outtakes -> not enough (intake) airflow for gpu with more than 2 hdd's installed. All by all it isn't a bad case tho ... at least for normal use ... for a gaming rig i wouldn't recomend it to someone else.

So the past 10 years i had several minor issues with my cases just because i did make compromises and my wife wouldn't let me spend all that money on a case (not totally thrue but hey i blame it on her cause it's easy )
Now she knows that silence come for a price (a bit my fault by running fans on higher rpm when she watches tele ) and i promised her to wait for a new case till the next upgrade (already wanted a lian li instead of my gigabyte)

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All pretty good cases.

I just have an old Coolermaster Centurion. It was cheapish and it seems to keep everything cool and is quiet. I'll put my next build into it I think, in the next few months

Those centurions are pretty good indeed for that kind of money. Builded a rig for a friend in a centurion and he's still very pleased (not a gamer tho)

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