More Heat Issues
All of my new parts arrived on Tuesday, and last night – after also replacing a DVD drive that had been acting up – I tried out the new setup with a round of Neverwinter Nights 2. I even left the side of the case off to make it easy! After about five minutes of playing… reboot.
Well crap!
I don’t consider the upgrade a complete bust. Prior to moving everything to the new case, I installed SpeedFan to keep an eye on my CPU temperature and as an added bonus it let me know my hard drive was running a little hot, too. The upgrade, consisting of front and rear case fans (the previous case had none) and better airflow all around, dropped the average temperatures of both the CPU and the hard drive under load by about 10 degrees celsius.
BUT… those apparently weren’t my immediate problems, and the better airflow doesn’t seem to have helped the crashing issue, cementing my graphics card as the leading suspect in my investigation. I’m not quite sure why I ever doubted it, since my problems began shortly after I bought the new card and promptly started bringing it to its knees with Oblivion.
Regardless of my previous diagnostic shortcomings, I set up the latest version of RivaTuner, put back into service the desk fan I had been using to keep things cool before the upgrade, and did some more experiments. With the fan running, NWN2 pushed the video card temperature up to a pretty steady 68 degrees celsius. I played the game for about half an hour without any hiccups before turning the fan off. At that point, the temperature climbed steadily to 74 degrees before another reboot.
A couple different sites show a number of cards with the same GPU as mine running (under load) at temperatures ranging from 58-100 degrees. Unfortunately, the exact make of my card isn’t one of the ones in either list, but the results make me think that something must not be right if my card is just completely crapping out at 75 degrees.
BFG offers a lifetime warranty for the card (assuming I can find the receipt) but I’m not entirely sure that it’s worth the hassle of actually returning the card and going without a computer for the length of time it’ll take them to get me a new one. If I want to just buy a new one I’m stuck with AGP for now, but Tiger Direct still seems to carry a decent variety of them, even if it’s becoming almost impossible to find them in stores. I’ll have to educate myself on the current video card lineups though, since everything I knew a year ago when I bought my current video card is now obsolete.
Or, maybe I can just leave the case open with a fan pointing at my video card until my next full PC upgrade.