G400 Fry-Up

[Raptor^]

Yeap, my G400 Max is cooking itself...

I was busy practicing in F1 GP3 (Wohoo.. I can get round Silverstone at a reasonable pace without a huge risk of falling off at every corner now... only another 15 tracks to go) when suddenley my machine rebooted. Thats suspicious I thought, but I fired up GP3 again... this time it only lasted 5 minutes before huge gfx corruption set in and the machine locked.

I had a quick prod around inside, and found that my gfx card seeemed extremely hot. So, I stuck a temperature sensor on the PCB at the back of the G400 chip, waited for it to cool off somewhat and turned it back on. Its sitting at 50C as I type this now.

I've just upgraded my machine (specs below) and the strange thing is, I had my comp at 133Mhz FSB the other day (had to borrow some PC133 RAM to see how fast it would go...) playing UT for some time and it worked fine then. The machine has been fine at its specced speed for a couple of days since then.

Any ideas on what could be causing my sudden overheating probs?? (yes the fan is still going)



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P3-700E, Abit BF6, 8.6 gig Seagate, 8.6 gig WD, SBLive 1024, 256Mb PC100... Mouse, Keyb, Stuff

[Scout255]

have you checked to see that the fan on the heatsink is still rotateing and it is not covered in caked on dust?

[Raptor^]

Yeah the heatsink / fan combo was a bit choked with dust, so I took the fan off and hoovered out the heatsink. Thats gained me a bit, its at 46C now, but it doesnt seem to go up as much while its under load now.

It still seems too high, so I'm trying to invent some extra cooling with spares from old machines I've got sitting around

[Jorden]

Another couple of questions: Are you OC'ing your Max as well? What's the speed you run your AGP bus on? And what is the temperature in the room you have your PC in?

Jord.

[Raptor^]

I have never OC'ed the Max (other than to see if I could once while I was bored), and the AGP bus is at 66Mhz. It was up at 89Mhz while my comp was overclocked, but I had to give the PC133 RAM back a couple of days before my probs started...

The room temp here is about 23C, CPU and BX chipset are both at 30C, which doesnt seem excessive.

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P3-700E, Abit BF6, G400 MAX, 8.6 gig Seagate, 8.6 gig WD, SBLive 1024, 256Mb PC100... Mouse, Keyb, Stuff

[Mark F]

Assuming you have adiquate cooling and good ventilation in your case, you might want to try a CARD COOLER (and others). It won't adress the cause directly, but it's an easy and inexpence way to provide extra cooling without any effect on warenties, and I've found it to benifit the whole system, not just the video card.

Mark F.

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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a DVD...
and burped out a movie