[Syed Fawad]

Well, been a really really long time since I even came to NGemu, so a hello to all my ol' buddies!

Secondly, I ran into some weird probs. It was like this, I got a deal on a Geforce 6600 (NON GT) AGP card with 256mb for 90$ with still 5 months of warranty left. I knew the guy and I saw how he had been using his card so no probs there. Bought the card, was very happy with it. Benchmarks were like 2000+ on 3dMark05 and 34000+ on Aquamark and it ran Doom3 and HL2 pretty smooth

Then, I thought to overclock it, got the clock to 350MHz and mem to 550MHz and the benchmarks ran fine. (hit 38000 in Aqua). However, upon playing games my system froze after a little while. I thought this may be overheat prob and it was.

Using a BIOS flash, I enabled the temp monitor on the 6600.......and I was SHOCKED to see an idle temp of around 78-89 deg celsius !!!! oO

I overclocked it, switched on the temp monitor of Rivatuner to watch a whole graph of changes and after running Aquamark test, I saw the temp maxing at 120C !!!!!! and that's a REAL NO NO :nono:

Immediately I opened up my PC and observed the card. Everything seemed fine. Then I called my "local" hardware expert and told him this. He asked me about my PSU which is of 300W. He said that your PSU is the problem, get a 400W or higher PSU and your card will be just fine.

I am here to ask if he is right, if the PSU has got anything to do with the ridiculously high temp of my GPU core?

I have asked my buddy to get me some new copper heatsinks anyways.

 

[Techie]

get watercooling kit if u wish to overclook ur gfx while remaining pretty stable

also get a decent psu, such as tagans new one, or enermax etc, ie no non branded psu's.

 

[MaZa]

Yes it does. It can even make your card explode. 300W is giving all it got to your system, especially your card, and when it does that, it might push too much voltage to your card. (the main powerconsumer)

 

[Mr. Killjoy]

Don't let your card plugged to a 300w PSU, or one (if not both) of them will fry...
it happened to me and I can say it's not fun

 

[ViperXtreme]

you may wanna check your heatsink if its properly seated to the GPU core, if the heatsink is not very hot while having a 80C idle temp, then it may not be having a good contact with the GPU core.

 

[fivefeet8]

Check your 12v rails on your PSU. If they are too low, then that might be the problem. PSU's get very hot when they are overworked.

 

[Syed Fawad]

Well, Viper's solution worked.
I touched my heatsink, it was just so so hot. I removed it and well, you guys won't believe it, there no nothing between the chip and the heatsink! My friend pasted some kind of paste on it, and stuck the sink using it and instantly my idle temps came down to 57Celsius. And during playing games it peaked at around 70Celsius. So I thought to overclock it now, and I managed to get it to 400MHz and 565MHz EASILY. Idle temp at 63 and peaking at 74. Now my memory is not going any higher, Coolbits says test fails when I increase anything over 565. However, GPU can still go high but I'll do that after getting a proper copper heatsink, or may be one of those fans that plugs in to the PCI slot next to the AGP card.

So I've got an AMD64 3000+ with 512 PC 3200 and this Geforce 6600 (400/565). I got 41479 on Aquamark......is that ok?

And thanks for all your help.

 

[ChankastRules]

ooo, I should definatly check my card too!, could be the problem... I posted a post about it being at 101C during play...

 

[46480]

Hey guys
How can i check the temp in my card
´cause my nvidia driver doesn´t show that.
Do I have to download something else?

 

[Guyver2K6]

Hey guys
How can i check the temp in my card
´cause my nvidia driver doesn´t show that.
Do I have to download something else?

How can i check the temp on my ati card?

 

[ChankastRules]

It's easy on ATI card there's a function for that included with the driver, it's in the same tab as override in the drivers menu/ control center if you use that.

 

[46480]

HEY I asked first :cuss2:

Againg... sigh

How can i check the temp of my nvidia card?

 

[MaZa]

Check the control panel of Nvidia drivers.

 

[Syed Fawad]

HEY I asked first :cuss2:

Againg... sigh

How can i check the temp of my nvidia card?

I don't think there's a temp monitor in the 5200 GPU core. If there is then its viewing might have been disabled in the driver.

For my 6600, I was not able to observe its temp, but on another board I learnt that the 6600 core has a temp monitor disabled from BIOS. So I had to dump my 6600 BIOS on a floppy, change a couple of hex values in it, and reflash the 6600 with the edited BIOS. Which enabled the temp viewing but also shows the 6600GT logo instead of the 6600 logo

I think this thing voids your warranty or something and can cause other probs too. (Imagines power cutoff during the flashing process......:???: )

Moreover, I think this thread has served its purpose. Now I only have to find some copper heatsinks to overclock this baby....

 

[Guyver2K6]

It's easy on ATI card there's a function for that included with the driver, it's in the same tab as override in the drivers menu/ control center if you use that.

i dont use CCC, is there another program?

 

[ChankastRules]

The override tab is there for the control panel too, well in most versions in 8.5 it was there in 8.6 it was gone, in 8.7 it was gone, again and in 8.8 it's back again I think... someone on ATI must be on crack hehehe, if you don't have it... I don't know any other way to check though... even if I'm sure there's a program for it.

 

[cooliscool]

Only ATi's XT cards have temp sensors.

 

[Syed Fawad]

I fried it........damn.

I mean, this time I didn even overclock it. I mean I did, but not intentionally. I forgot to switch on an external big fan right next to my casing which I use "temporarily" for overclocking (that is, till I don't get proper cooling kits). I didn switch it on and I forgot to scale down the clock speed from 450MHz....so at 450MHz without sufficient cooling, I played CS source for an hour or two. After which I saw the temp at 90Celsius. I didn pay much attention to it, as (when I started this thread) that used to be touched by my card everytime. Anyways, I shut down my PC, went to lunch and came back an hour later. When I switched on my PC again, well, it never got on. It reached the part where WinXP is loading up but even that loading screen was all "chopped" up. Pixelated. Then my system froze. This happened thrice. Then I booted up in safe mode......all gibberish screen. THen I loaded Win98....it was fine till I installed the drivers. After that, its all gibberish/hanging thing again

So I went to claim warranty Such idiots here, they donno what's overclocking and what's bios flashing is .........I think these things void your warranty but I'll be getting a replacement in a week. That's cool right, I mean, I am gonna a get a NEW card in replacement for the old one that I bought cheap? Heh, its good but I am off from gaming for at least a week (except for those which run on a TNT2 M64 ) and I probably won't be playing with overclocking again

Now its certain that my card went bad because of the high temp, but I wanna ask.......how was it that it ran on this temp for over 5 months and now it goes bad when the temp is not really THAT bad....I mean, it used to go over 100 easily when I started this thread. Why didn it fry then. Why now? Or its got something to do with the high clock?

 

[ChankastRules]

Like ChrisRay wisely said in another thread, running over 100C won't directly break it but it'll decrease the life-time of the card.

 

[Syed Fawad]

Check your 12v rails on your PSU. If they are too low, then that might be the problem. PSU's get very hot when they are overworked.

Well, my dealer tells me that he checked the card and it seems to be working fine and now again he's suspecting my PSU.

I just wanted to ask, when I had the 6600 in my system, my 12V were down to 11.543V .............. I wanna know if that's a big fall. Because currently (with a TNT2 in there) it shows 12.03V.