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Solved: Question about normal GPU/CPU temperatures and overheating.

4K views 2 replies 1 participant last post by  sonelliot 
#1 ·
Hi guys,

I just recently built a new computer with a Quad Core CPU (Intel Quad Core Q6600), 3 GB RAM and the ASUS P5N32-E motherboard.

Because the DX10 cards are so expensive right now I decided to wait off getting a new graphics card for a while and use my old ATI Radeon X850XT PE from my old computer.

It's been running fine for about two weeks now. But recently I've been crashing a lot while playing games (some of which are pretty old and shouldn't be that hard to run).

I decided to check out what temperatures its running at so I downloaded ATITools and Speed Fan.

While running KoTOR my GPU core temperature was sitting around 79-82 degrees celcius. After 20-30 min my computer crashed. The CPU temperature was around 45-50 degrees celcius.

I tried Counter Strike: Source as well and the temperatures were sitting around 85-89 degrees celcius on the GPU and 47-50 on the CPU.

I've tried taking the GFX card out of the case and cleaning any dust out of the fan and heatsink. I couldn't figure out how to unscrew the the plastic casing accross the top of the fan and heatsink, so instead I just sucked as much dust out as I could with a vacuum clearner. There's still some dust built up around the fan blades and in between the vertical elements of the heatsink. I think that I could probably do a better job clearing out the dust later with an air gun.

In the meantime I just wanted to know whether these temperatures were something to worry about or are they normal for GPUs? I read around on google and most people seemed to indicate that between 60-70 was fine and above that was problematic; which made me worry because in most games I'm running the temperatures are above 70 on the GPU. Most people also seemed to indicate that 40-50 (or even above) was normal for CPUs.

Anyway suggestions would be appreciated. Many thanks in advance. :)
 
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#2 ·
Hey guys, bit of an update for you:

I was messing around in ATITools and I discovered the Fan Controls section. I set it to override the driver fan control and aim to keep the temperature at about 70 degrees celcius. I think booted up HL2 with max settings.

Now, I know that my gfx card can handle HL2 with everything turned up and on high resolution because I played the game from start to finish on my old computer with no problems and no overheatings.

Keeping an eye on both the fan speed and the GPU temperature I played the game. It maintained a 70 degree temperature easily, without using the full 100% fan speed. In fact in most situations the fan speed was about 80-90%. The highest I see it climb to was 98% during the whole time.

It crashed again, but only when I started changing the sound options around.

This got me thinking about all of the crashes I've had. The one consistent factor was sound irregularities. In KoTOR I couldn't run the game with sound working properly unless I forced it to run through software. On any other mode there was really weird distortions.

Thinking that it might be the sound card I openned up the case took it out. I cleaned away a lot of dust from the back of the board and also moved it up to a different PCI slot. I haven't installed the drivers yet; however, it seems to working fine.

I'm going to test it now to see if it crashes anymore.

Wish me luck :p
 
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