8800GTX overheating

[kkbigal]

I've had my BFG 8800 GTX for over 18 months now and it's been a great card. As of last night, it seems to have developed some kind of heat issue - the system locks during games with a screen full of artifacts and prompts a system reset.

I checked the GPU temp in Vista and it was running 75c idle whereas it used to be around 50c.

I cranked the GPU fan speed up to 100% and it cooled it down to about 60c and games run for a while, but it eventually overheats.

I've never overclocked the card - it's only ever run at stock speed and it's the very original BFG model, not an OC/OC2. I'm going to have the card out and clean off any dust, but I can't understand why it's suddenly developed this heat problem - it just went like this last night.

Other than cleaning the card, is there anything else I could try?

 

[kkbigal]

Thanks for the advice guys

I did actually install the new WHQL 17.15 (or whatever version they are) that came out on May 16th. It's worked fine for a few days and only started giving me problems yesterday, so I don't think it's the drivers. Even so, I reverted to 169.xx drivers this morning but didn't have time to test anything.

I know the fan's got dust in it because I cleaned the dust out of everything else except the gfx card - I couldn't be bothered to remove it from the board basically I'm really hoping it's just a congestion of dust and not something more sinister...

 

[kkbigal]

Unfortunately it seems a bit more terminal than I thought.

I cleaned out the fan but it made no difference since the gpu reached 78c idle and I started getting artifacts and hangs on the desktop

I'm down to a 7950GX2....euuurch