suddenly overhearting gpu

recently i had my computer restart a few times, and after looking into it i found that SpeedFan was saying that my gpu was somewhere between 55 and 65 degrees while running most my games.
one of these is a newer game, DC universe online. which is more resource intensive than others i play like Heroes of Newerth. however, currently my computer ends up at least 60 degrees playing the other game. which has never caused any problems, which leads me to wonder if my video card may in fact be near death or something.

i am wondering if all these signs of overheating on previously easy to run games may indeed mean that my video card is dying. or if there is something esle to consider, as even for the first two weeks of playing DC universe online i was able to easily play it on high settings( now it has heating issues with even med settings).

thank you.

 

that doesn't seem too high to me. My gpu (Nvidia 8800gt) regularly runs 65 -70 or more while playing (black ops, bfbc2). I would be more suspicious of drivers and/or other heat issues that aren't gpu related. what os are you running?

 

I agree, problem is elsewhere as my GPU's run at 90C normally at full load. Run OCCT which will give you graphs right until the machine shuts down. Good diagnostic tool.

Did you check your fans for proper operation?

 

uh ok, i will download this program and test it out. i just thought that the pretty much burnout temps for most any bit of hardware was like 60-70 degrees abouts.

and as far as fans, one of the blades broke on one of them. so i took off the side of the comp case and the little horizontal bar that has another fan on it for the gpu i guess. thereafter i put a boxfan next to my computer and run that on a fairly high setting while running any game.
i looked into buying at least one new fan to replace that, but most i saw on newegg were either saying that they didnt move much air or were noise as hell. doesnt seem to be a pleasant medium there.

however, again, i figured that a boxfan on the side and gamebooster to lower workload would be fine. there is also one fan on front and back, as well as whatever fan the gpu has itself. i am running win 7 64 bit with a 9500gt nvidia card. going to test that one program that was suggested as soon as i can tho and try to report back.

 

i am not sure if a few restarts caused me to be overzealous about temperatures, but i didn't get a restart whilst trying to leave the dc game running and such.
but the recommended program apparently needs a decent amount of memory to run, and with that said makes the game run a bit choppy(at least in places). the info it came up with didn't show the temp supposedly going much over 60 degrees, however it did look to spike quite frequently. nothing else that i saw register as being overworked, so i am neither sure what caused it nor what else would have besides the gpu.

so im not sure, but my mind still puts my (what i thought to be founded) idea of 60-70 being hot for anything to run at... and my video card being fairly old.... that i probably need a new one.
not sure what is a decent compromise for upgrading that 9500gt, but i imagine i might need to. also i guess ati supposedly a possibly better choice since its supposed to run better with amd's.

guess i cant do much besides keep an eye on it, but i cant do much of anything serious with that app running(as it takes up most of the remainder of my 4gigs ram, which never usually goes over half used).

 

I agree with the guys, 60-70C is not high, I used to run my old X1950 at 90+ while gaming, my current HD4890 runs at around 68C while gaming.

What about CPU temps? have you thought of that and looked into it? Perfectly possible your heat sink is clogged or your thermal paste is dry. Doesn't sound like GPU heat problem to me, if your GPU is old then it might be burning out but I'd check others first.
If you want to buy a new G card then great, but a bit pointless when it's possible you might buy one and it still crashes on you because it wasn't the GPU.

Grab "Speccy" and install rather than speed fan, it gives you more info and I find it more acurate.

http://majorgeeks.com/Speccy_d6358.html

Also when checking temps, note temps at idle (just desktop running) and then note them after a few minutes of gaming.

Edit: Make sure your PC is dust free as well.

 

the cpu is 35 degrees idle/not gaming, and the gpu is 47 degrees idle. the last test with the recommended occt program made the game choppy, but it didnt restart(i cant say if this was a strange occurrence or not). the temperatures according to occt for the gpu never went over 65 degrees, and the cpu (none of the four cores) went over about 54 degrees.

i cannot be sure if it was overheating or not, but i dont necessarily want to go back to running the game on high setting and see if i can also run occt as well. the game felt sluggish on normal with the program running as it was. but that might be what i have to do.

i cant say that i know if a box fan to the side of the computer works as well as the now broken side fan for the case. however i dont see any signs of any other reason besides the gpu, even tho the programs have yet to document it(as well as i had been minimizing to check temperatures and giving it a sec to cool down every so after after i started figuring it might be overheating.

guess more waiting is in store.

 

Do not run OCCT and a game at the same time as that will skew the results. Just OCCT will do the job by itself, actually pushing your hardware harder than any game could. From the sounds of it your hardware sounds good.:confused

 

Agreed, this sounds more like Driver or software issues.
Unless you're getting RAM leakage or some such.

A run of "memtest" wouldn't go amiss. Then I guess we start looking at possible software conflicts and driver info.

 

well i switched back to high settings on dc universe online a while ago after downloading the nvidia drivers again...all seems to be well enough. i cant still honestly say that everything is working in tip top shape, but with no restarts as of yet im just going with it.