It's only a matter of time before my 8800GT bursts in flames. I play on a 19" 1440x900 monitor and this won't change in the near future. I also have a C2D E8400 OC'd to 3.6 GHz and 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM. I only want to upgrade the GPU. It's also worth noting that my motherboard is PCI-E v. 1.0.

Thanks.

I had this card for more than 2 years now and it's doing great on my 1440x900 LCD monitor. It's a Gigabyte and came with a Zalman heatsink and a factory overclock of 700/920/1715.

A few months ago, I started having problems with games where the game will freeze requiring a hard reset or a lock up with an error message of nvdlkm stopped working. It idles at 65C and when gaming it can reach 90C, on Furmark it crosses the 100C mark and crashes the program.

I have cleaned the heatsink, changed the thermal paste, did everything I can think of, and it still overheats. I swapped it for my brother's 4870 just to check that nothing else on my PC is causing the problem and it even reproduced the same problem in his rig.

I am thinking of upgrading to a GTX460 or 5770 or wait for the new 6000 series, but I hate to leave working hardware behind. Is there a nice, cheap heatsink that I can use or will it simply won't help? I may use it as a Physx card or for FAH. I forgot to say that I run folding@home on it and it never gave me a problem or crashed or a bad WU, and it remains in the 90C temp.

Opinions, please.

[QUOTE="Nightfall31"]

So many computer owners overlook the cooling aspect of utilizing a rig...When cards etc go wrong, many times its due to high operating temps. Extreme heat can cause a rig to develop various kinds of problems.

Myself, I learned the hardway. Airflow/temperature control is a underrated aspect of running a gaming rig.....

kaitanuvax

My card has been idling 50-60C and loading 80-90C for up to a year now, no problems.

Now it idles 38C and max load 70C.

The thing is, I will be more than pissed off if I pay for DDR2 now (what I consider to be really expensive compared to previous prices) only to find that prices went down steeply like in last spring.

Lesson of the day: when you want to buy something and you have the money, BUY IT.

I just want to kick myself for not maxing the RAM (max is 8 GB and I currently have 4, I know it's not needed now, but I intend to run them for a looong time) in my current systems when DDR2 RAM was selling really cheap. So, is this going to happen again, or from now on DDR3 prices will decrease and DDR2 prices are going to go up and up?

To format, you have to be on XP pro, or at least Vista Home premium > right click my computer > manage > disk management > click the hard drive, format it... Half hour(unless quick format)... Done.

JigglyWiggly_