X1900 GT temps

**ifander** · 04-10-2007

A friend of mine is having problems with his graphics. They first appeared when we were having a LAN party last week and he was playing Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. He began having severe artifacts, and when I installed ATI tray tools on his PC, the temperature on the graphics cards core were around 60 deg. C in Windows. I enabled the harware monitoring and let him run Mark of Chaos again, and the temps topped out at 104 deg. C! I doubt that it should get this warm, another friend of mine has an X1950 Pro, and it never goes above 65 deg. C in 3D mode.
I figured it might have been damaged during transport, but the cooler is there and intact. It uses active cooling, a one-slot solution, so the temps can't be expected to be great, but neither should they be so high, right?

His card is an X1900 GT based around the R580 core.

**Yawgm0th** · 04-10-2007

If the fan appears to be functioning, I'd advise reseating the heatsink and applying Arctic Silver 5 instead of the factory thermal compound. Make sure it gets a good, firm placement over the GPU. Make sure any case fans are functioning and that he had decent airflow, as well.

**ifander** · 04-11-2007

Removing the HSF would void the warranty, right? Well, I guess we'll have to do it anyway. We tried setting up a low-rpm fan blowing at the card from the left case cover, to provide it with some fresh air, but that only lowered the env. temps on the card by 20 deg. C. It had little effect on the core temperature. I'll reattatch the cooler, apply some new TIM, and see what happens. Maybe the R580 core just runs hotter than other cores...

**Yawgm0th** · 04-11-2007

No, 104c isn't normal on a GPU. If additional air cooling didn't help, then that verifies the problem is with the heatsink. They'll never be able to tell you did it if you have to send it in for repair/exchange, so don't worry about the warranty.

Of course, you could just send it in for warranty repair/exchange right now, seeing as a stock speed card is having heat problems.

**Jalida** · 06-06-2007

104c is Not normal on the X1900GT. Mine would top out at about 85-90c under extreme 3D gaming.

Even using the built in OC tool in the control panel it never got higher then 92c when the OC tool clocked it to the maximum.

I'd say to first check if the fan is still spinning, if it's not then a replacement will be necessary.

If the fan is running okay with no abnormal sounds etc, then take a room fan and open up the side of the computer case and blow the fan into the case and see how it runs then. If it drops to an acceptable temperature then it would seem likely that the cases cooling is no longer adequate for one reason or another.