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BFG 295GTX - Overheating?

SirConfused

SirConfused

SirConfused

Associate
Joined
3 Feb 2009
Posts
950
So, after seeing the saddening news that it looks like the end of the line for BFG, I think my GPU has decided to have a bit of a fail of it's own.

The situation is this: I recently got Bad Company 2 and after reasonable (2-3 hours tops) amounts of gaming the entire pc would lock up for no apparent reason, requiring a hard reset to get it going again.
The first thing I tried was rolling back the drivers, which seemed to fix the problem for a while but it started up again later on (I went from the 257.21 back down to the 197.45 drivers).
I thought it might be a cooling issue and turned the case fans up to no avail, but then next time I went into the Nv control panel and manually adjusted the fan speed up to 80%. (making more damn noise than i've ever heard the card make in my life). This seems to have fixed the problem as i've not had a crash in 2 days now, by adjusting the fan speed manually to 80% every time I play the game.

My question is this:
Have I really found the cause of the problem or am I somehow masking it by cranking up the cooling on the GPU? And also; why aren't the drivers automatically cooling the damn GPU enough themselves/is there a way to force the drivers to do it rather than having to manually set it every time I want to play games?

Thanks in advance for any help.

(I should also add that the GPU is not overclocked in any way and never has been, although the CPU has been running at 3.6GHz for it's entire life)
 
Just to update, it appears that the fan has nothing to do with the problem as I got a crash earlier.

Any ideas what might be the problem? If it only happens in one game I would assume that points towards a problem with the game rather than a problem with the GPU/drivers?
 
Do you have thermometer in room? Ambient temperatures at my parents house on Wednesday was 25c with the window open and in my spare room at the flat it could have been as high as 30c.

These ambient temperatures can have a dramatic effect on the cooling of your components, last night I was playing counter strike source and my HD5770 got as high as 71c on auto fan speed. I would say your card is getting to hot and it’s down to the heat wave we’ve been experiencing.

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of settings the fan speed through the drivers use Riva Tuner and setup up profiles in that it’s very easy to do.
 
I'm not sure about this but it might help if you take the side panel off for the time being. Maybe someone else can confirm if this is a good idea or not.
 
As far as I can tell it doesn't appear to be a GPU heat issue... After running Fur Mark multi-gpu mode for a good few hours (3-4) the temp peaked at 80 and never got beyond that. Also, oddly enough the GPU fan didn't seem to spin up any more than it normally does, ie very quiet. It has been suggested that it might be a CPU issue as there might not be quite enough juice to run the 3.6 I have my i7 set at.

I'm going to try cranking the Vcore up slightly and see how that works out. Unfortunately i'm working over the weekend so all this will have to wait until Monday but I will update once I figure out if that fixes the problem.
 
Take the side panel off and put a desk fan directly on to it. This should knock a few degrees off of the operating temps. Also, how long have you used it? It might be worth getting some good thermal paste and re-doing the paste on it (also give you a chance to check if any corner of it is full of dust!)

Also might want to look into software volt modding and see if you can under volt the card slightly (usually a card will undervolt slightly and be completely stable) and this will also knock a few degrees off the operating temps!

Might want to also try downclocking the ram slightly to check if it's not the ram that's going?

Good luck!

Edit: Just saw above post. Doh! Oh well, good luck ;D
 
I've tried bumping the voltage to the Vcore and temps are still fine, prime still works fine in all modes for substantial amounts of time yet the game still crashes. I'm fairly convinced at this point that it's not a GPU problem but it's still a pain in the arse trying to figure out just what the problem is. I'm going to try downclocking today to see if that fixes it.
 
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