Is my video card overheating?

[torseller07]

Hi all. Last night I was playing Crysis 1.2 on medium setting on my PC. After about the parachute scene at the beginning of the game, the graphics start to get corrupted (I see boxes and incorrect rendered objects). After I quit the game and return back to desktop, it looks like things are still not back to normal and I continue to see corrupted graphics. I did a soft reboot and the problems persist.

I shut down the PC for the night and restarted it this morning. I still see a few boxes at the beginning but they seem to be gone now after another hard reboot.

Does this sound like my video card is overheating? I am running my card at stock speed with stock cooling, and the card was bought in January this year. Any comments are welcome, thanks!

[trixstar]

sorry, but you forgot to mention what card you are using.. very important i must say..

[terrybear]

I would say if its new get it ready for rma .... from the sounds of it I can draw 1 guess as to what its gotta be ... a nvidia card .... :P

[torseller07]

Sorry I forgot to mention the critical information. :) Here you go:

Asus A8N-E nForce 4 motherboard
Athlon 64 X2 4400+
HIS HD 3870 IceQ 3 512MB GDDR4 PCIe (http://www.hisdigital.com/html/product_ov.php?id=364&view=yes)
Corsair TwinX2048-3200C2 PT DDR400 memory
Corsair HX620W PSU

Using Windows XP Pro SP2, Catalyst 8.3 and nForce 6.86 drivers.

P.S. Everything else runs fine (e.g. Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike) except Crysis.

[trixstar]

I would say if its new get it ready for rma .... from the sounds of it I can draw 1 guess as to what its gotta be ... a nvidia card .... :P

nope.. doesn't fit the op's description at all =p

[Amourek]

Play it with the side panel off and a house fan blowing over the card. If it fixes it (or lessens the problem) then you know it's overheating.

[terrybear]

but he does have nvidia onboard ... so :P

Anyways ... well if its only doin it in crysis then its the game itself not the card as I have the same his card & have not had any heat issues with it since I got it as a replacement for the standard HIS 1 I had before.

So I would then have to say it is a software issue not hardware as I originaly was suspecting. I think there was some kinda patch for crysis & 3xxx series cards too recently.

[torseller07]

So I would then have to say it is a software issue not hardware as I originaly was suspecting. I think there was some kinda patch for crysis & 3xxx series cards too recently.

Link please?

BTW, idle temperature on my card is about 47c and load temperature is about 57c. Is this normal? I am running at stock speed with stock cooling.

[terrybear]

Link please?

BTW, idle temperature on my card is about 47c and load temperature is about 57c. Is this normal? I am running at stock speed with stock cooling.

don't have a link for it sorry just do a google & something should pop up about it.

in regards to your temp ? in my current P160w tower I get a idle of 46c & load of 56c on stock clocks. Still have to see what it will be when my Antec 900 gets here friday if not monday for shure & I swap the config into it.

The defective non iceq3 version I had was doin 76c on idle & 93c on load but would still run fine.

[torseller07]

OK. I start to believe this is not overheating then. I have already contacted HIS technical support and see what their opinions are. It sounds to me though this is either a driver or BIOS issues (i.e. it's software related).

Later tonight I will try to downgrade to Catalyst 7.11 (which is the one HIS recommends) and see if I can reproduce the problem. Will keep you guys updated. :)

[terrybear]

good,

Yeah with the faulty HIS card I had before .. I knew something was up when everytime I installed the catalyst driver I would get a error after the driver install, but everything else would run fine. I then found that when in 3d mode the card would never spin up the fan & I had to manualy bump the fan up with rivatuner.

[torseller07]

I believe I solved the problem. I turned off Catalyst A.I. (driver optimization) and everything works perfectly. So I believe it's probably some bad driver code in Catalyst 8.3 that messed things up.