Stopped Crunching

[Siborg]

Looks like I have stopped crunching, for a while anyway. I knew my power supply was under a strain at 400w and a couple of weeks ago it finally gave out with an unsettling and surprisingly loud bbbbzzzzzzz pop followed by blank monitors and a bit of smoke floating up from behind the box.

Replaced it with a 650w a few days later and I'm good to go again. This week my gfx card starts acting all unstable like, getting very hot, crashing and sometimes completely unresponsive it's overheating even though it's spotlessly clean. The fan is making 120db when it's hard at work and apart from the noise it's doing it's job pretty well.

I reseated it and updated drivers etc but it looks to be on it's way out too.
Replacing a high end card is not something my wallet can stretch to right now so it's taking a siesta for the time being. I could always stick to CPU crunching but really, is it worth it on a dual core 2.13ghz?

So crunching is a thing of the past for me until I can get something sorted, it's just not worth the strain on my system atm  

[Temujin]

Try going into the ATI Catalyst Control Centre and manually setting the fan speed.
When mine are set to auto, they make a heck of a noise, but when I set them to 50% I can only just hear them and the card still runs nice and cool at 63C

[Siborg]

I'll give that a try, cheers Temujin.

[Siborg]

It's a no go I'm afraid. Card gets up to 88c which is pretty scary and no amount of fan speed keeps it cool, that's at 100% too.

[UBT - Mikee]

It's a no go I'm afraid. Card gets up to 88c which is pretty scary and no amount of fan speed keeps it cool, that's at 100% too.

Hmm. I had a 8800 running at 100+ degrees a few months ago. It wasn't running that high for long but was still working okay though very loud! Removal for the cover and a good clean sorted that out but it still usually runs at 82-83 degrees. You've done everything I can think of other than trying a different GPU project (or motherboard drivers - though that's a long shot!).

[Ben]

It's a no go I'm afraid. Card gets up to 88c which is pretty scary and no amount of fan speed keeps it cool, that's at 100% too.

Ah a friend of mine had a similar problem to you. I gave him one of my ATI 4850's and kept one for myself, however when he was running a GPU project we would find the CC center would report temperatures upto 110 degrees C!

To combat this we took the GPU card to bits, hovered out a large amount of dust and added some some CPU thermal paste to the central chip. It now runs at about 80 degrees going full welly! Quite an improvement!

Another way to cool it may be to move any other PCI cards that you have down the motherboard (if possible), to give the card a better chance to breath as it where.

Defiantly try and add some more thermal paste to the main GPU though, it would probably make the word of difference!