[Descenterace]

I was playing Pariah about thirty minutes ago when the PC speaker beeped.

First thought: 'Didn't I turn off CPU temperature monitoring?'
Second thought: 'Yes, but only the automatic shutdown because it's buggy as hell on this mainboard.'
Third thought: 'Better check the temps.'

Pariah is one of those games that insists on hijacking every system resource it can find and refuses to relinquish them until it's closed. It apparently includes 'screen focus' in the list of resources it considers its own.
Nonetheless, Alt-Tab did show a window very, very briefly... An ATI Catalyst-style window.
So, I close the game.

'Your GPU is running above a safe temperature. The frequency has been reduced to compensate.'

I have no idea what a 'safe temperature' is for an X800XT, but I'm damned sure that 104°C is vastly in excess of it. It seems that the fan on the oversized Arctic Silencer cooler had stopped.

So... shutdown, unplug, remove graphics card (which is a real ***** when the massive lump of metal and plastic that comprises the cooler leaves no room to get to the AGP slot locking lever).

I have no idea why the fan stopped, since it ran fine when I plugged it directly into a 9V battery. It's running fine right now. But is this going to affect the resale value much? I mean, 104°C? Can GPUs really suck that up and keep going? I know the CPU can't.

[mikhael]

Actually, my AMD 2600+ has run for days at a time at 104C. Turns out that sometimes the fan bearing is siezing up from the heat, stopping the fan. That's the only indication I have (since the machine reboots whenever the fan stops). It still runs great. My buddy at AMD is wondering why the chip didn't melt into slag, but his engineer coworkers thought it was great when he told them.

[Descenterace]

Yeah, I think heat is the reason for my GPU cooler stopping.

Either that or some idiot thought that putting a temperature cutout set for 55°C on a cooling fan expected to handle up to 70°C was a good idea.

[Prophet]

Originally posted by mikhael
My buddy at AMD is wondering why the chip didn't melt into slag, but his engineer coworkers thought it was great when he told them.

I agree with him. Exept that wondering doesn't even begin to cover it for me...

[CP5670]

The GPUs can generally handle much higher temperatures than CPUs for whatever reason (mid-80s is pretty normal), but 104C is still too high especially with an AC silencer. I've never really heard of anyone else having problems with the fans on those coolers.

I have an Athlon C 1400mhz that used to pass 100C regularly. It still gets to 83C or so on load easily, but has been working fine for three years.

You might want to try that new Thermalright V1 cooler instead. It's supposed to be much better than anything else, right up there with watercooling, and unlike most Thermalright products, is competitively priced. The only issue with it is that it doesn't allow for separate memory cooling, but that's still better than having the GPU's burning heatsink touching the memory.

[Descenterace]

I'm switching to water cooling in a month or two anyway (and a GF7800GTX). No point getting a new cooler now.

Pariah seems to be the only game I have which causes this. Doom 3 gets the card pretty hot, but it doesn't stop the fan.

I don't think my GPU has ever exceeded 70°C before. It idles at 36°C, and Doom 3 raises it to about 60°C in complex areas.

[edit]
OK, the damn thing just stopped for the fourth time today. This time, though, I wasn't playing Pariah. I was browsing webcomics. So I doubt that heat is actually the problem.
Looks like I'll be buying that 7800GTX earlier than I planned.