Why would any video card be manufactered at a clock setting that it can't handle and be sold as a retail product? O_o The thing I would do is take the heatsink off from the Chipset and replace the thermal paste, as the ones that come with video cards put on my the GPU Manufacterer are pretty lousy most of the time. I did that to my old GeForce4 MX440, and it helped some. I'm still bound to do this to my Radeon X700. If that doesn't help, get a fan for the heatsink if you don't already have one. If that doesn't help, install proper ventilation in your case; usually one 80mm fan at the bottom front and one at the top back should do it. My PC has 13+ fans. Two in the bottom front, one in the top back, another in the top back attached to my PSU pushing air into it, another inside the PSU pushing air out, two attached to my HDD, one on my CPU heatsink, another on my NorthBridge Chipset heatsink, a built-in fan on my GPU's heatsink, another fan in my secondary PSU, and two builton on the side of my case. I recieve satisfiable air cooling. By personal preference I am disgusted with my CPU exceeding temperatures of 110F, and especially when it reaches 120F (which is very seldom does, has only happened once). It doesn't breach my 110F marker that often either. Likes to hang out at 104F while being overclocked to 2GHz from the default factory settings of 1.6GHz. See http://www.hlrse.net/Qwerty/systeminfo/ for my system specs. Since there is no heat sensor on my GPU, I don't know what its temperature goes up to - but it certainly doesn't go any farther than 130F. Surely it stays around 115F to 119F when I'm gaming, and a lot cooler when it's idling (based on a comparison of touching my GPU Heatsink and my CPU Heatsink). Also, too many fans could only make things worse, while too little can be worse also. You should add one fan at a time to see how it improves idling temperatures.
Yeah, I'll probably replace the grease first and then if that doesn't work, get a new video card, a 6200 or something -Sheep
Hey, it happened with a lot of the GeForce 7900 GTX line. All these manufacturers clocked it beyond what it was actually capable of running at. It resulted in a problem where the cards would lock up in intensive (graphics-wise) game play for like fifteen, thirty seconds. Then it would just go back to running normally. I really need to call BFG Tech and have them walk me through fixing them (I could do it myself, but this way, if anything goes wrong, I'm not to blame).
*yawn* Temp on left is video card heatsink during idle if I remember...temp on right is HDD motor temperature. Temperature is in celcius
A productive post as always, PHASER8! Friggin' furry! My GeForce 7900 GTX OCs idle at around 43°C and 50°C - a cookie if you guess which one is being blocked by the soundcard sandwiched between them.
