Alarming overheating issues (X800 XT PE)

M

Morticium

Geek Trainee
Hello everybody,

I've been using this ATI Radeon X800 XT PE (Sapphire) for awhile and never had any issues with it until about two months ago. I only play World of Warcraft, so I couldn't really see if the problems would happen in other games.

At the beginning I would usually get total system freezes while playing the game, mostly only like twice a week, wich didn't worry that much... but I still knew something was going on. Only once during those two months I've had the same thing happen while I was burning a DVD, wich was pretty odd considering that my recent crashes seem to be linked to my video card.

For about two weeks or so, the frequent system freezes have stopped while playing and instead were replaced by temporary freezes (monitor blacking out) and VPU error reports from ATI. It is starting to worry me alot now, sometimes I can get up to three reports within an hour, and then my system can totally freeze again... requiring me to reboot. I've decided to check out the temperature on my Catalyst Control Panel while playing World of Warcraft and, granted I don't know much at all about hardware, the temperature of my video card would go up to 111 celsius! It wouldn't ever go below mid 90s... so I am really worried about this now. The temperature while only doing desktop is 65 celsius, I have no idea if this is normal, a confirmation would be great.

I know it isn't my PSU, it's new and pretty powerful. Nothing much has changed within those 2 months. I bought a new 20' Widescreen (1680x1050 for desktop and gaming) monitor and installed the recent ATI drivers. Can display drivers make a video card go totally crazy like that? I only have one screen available, so I can't really try out different drivers right now... this monitor is kinda weird and doesn't really display anything if I have no drivers installed, unless it is safe to install the new ones without uninstalling the current ones I have.

Any help would me more than appreciated, this is causing me alot of stress and I'd love to find a way to fix this, thank you.
 
Although I haven't got a lot of experience with ATI cards, I can tell you that those temperatures are indeed alarming.

Can you verify your cards cooler is actually working? If the card still has the stock cooler there should be a fan connector on the card itself which might be loose.

Keep in mind that hot air needs to be vented out of the case too, although I don't think temperatures could rise to 111 degrees due to bad ventilation. There's a good cooler available for a X800 from Arctic which uses DHES (Direct Heat Exhaust System ) which prevents the fan from recycling warm air to cool the GPU, since it exhausts warm air from the slot below the X800 backplate when installed.

Leave the case's side panel off for a while. Your cards fan might be broken, if possible oyu might get a replacement fan / card if it's still within the warranty period. Otherwise you might have to look for a replacement aftermarket cooler.

Drivers CAN make a difference, but even then only by a couple of degrees. I can't imagine it being a driver problem.

Good luck, hope it doesn't fry on you in the meanwhile.

Greetings,

Marcus
 
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