My Radeon 9800 Pro has started “overheating” and locking at around 95F/35C, which seems quite low to me. The card has a Zalman passive cooler on it, as well as a mounted 80mm fan on the top expelling the air from the card. My computer room has horrible ventilation and borders a non-insulated store room. While this hasn’t caused too much of a problem during previous summers, this year I had to run a hose directly from my AC to the card in order to play anything. I had thought that once the severe temperatures dropped off, the problem would go away; it hasn’t. Once winter hits, this shouldn’t be a problem, but it is very annoying in the interim.
It is currently not overclocked, but I had been moderately overclocking before the problem cropped up. Do you think I’ve damaged the card or is there something I’m missing?
Weird - do you have the old (active) cooler you could put on there? I had the fan die on my stock cooler and my card started to get hot enough to burn my fingers, I’m not sure what the Zalman is rated to/at but 35c doesn’t sound very hot at all.
The alternative to putting the old cooler back on is to open the case and point a 12 inch fan into the case, worked for me while I was waiting for my new cooler to arrive. At least that’ll let you know if it is actually heat related.
35°C is incredibly cool. That’s the temperature of my motherboard! I don’t know about ATI cards but healthy Nvidia cards idle at 60-70°C, so I find it hard to believe that cooling is the issue. Try reseating the card. If that doesn’t help I’m afraid it’s broken, maybe due to a combination of old age and your previous overclocking.
That’s actually what I’m doing. I’ve got both sides of the case open with a fan on either side (one intake, one exhaust). No dice. I wouldn’t think it’s heat related except that it craps out at 95-96 like clockwork and that pointing an air conditioned feed directly at it solves the problem. All the symptoms are classic overheat, too (sparklies, tearing, etc.). Of course, I’ve never had a broken card before, so maybe that’s an indication of basic failure, too.
Not lately, but I did after the problem cropped up earlier this summer. I use Omega drivers, but maybe I’ll drop down to the newest Catayst revision and see if that does anything.
