GPU too hot forcing Windows to shutdown?

[rapperwith1p]

I have a stock reference evga 8800gt the with the revised bios for better fan speeds. The rest of the system is an E6600 at stock and 2gb of ddr2 800 ram along with a Corsair vx520 PSU with one 500gb hd and 2 optical drives. The mobo is an ecs 7050vt-m matx mobo and nothing is overclocked.

Ok, so I was playing Civ Colonization the other night and my PC just shuts down instantly by itself without any warning or bsod. I turn it back on and fire up the game only to have the same thing happen to me a few mins into the game. So I decide to call it and night and give the PC some rest. Today I fire up GRID and play for a few mins on ultra settings and it dies on me 10 mins in or so.

I check my temps and they seem to be ok as the card is idling at 60c and is around mid to high 70s during operation. My CPU is at mid to high 40s so that's fine. I'm at a loss on what's going on as none of my components are overclocked and the system is stable for normal operation even for encoding.

The weird thing is that I was playing World In Conflict and Mercenaries 2 for hours on end 2-3 days ago and nothing happened. WIC gave me some weird sound problems and I attributed that to working the card too hard so knocked it down from very high to high settings and all went well. I haven't tried to knock down the settings in GRID from ultra to high yet but that just pisses me off that I have to do that as my temps are within the accepted operating range. Oh yea in Civ Colonization which isn't even a demanding game I have it at high with 4xAA and the temps are just in the mid 70s. Another thing to note is that the card starts to fire up the fan as soon as I get into the game menu of GRID as if it's having a hard time rendering or something.

I know I don't have the best cooling in the world and airflow could be improved but the temps I reported above should not have a problem and I shouldn't be experiencing this annoyance. I'm using Rivatuner to control the fan speeds with a Tmin of 60 a Tmax of 85 min fan speed at 50 and max at 100.

Ahhh, sorry for the long rant but I'm just so pissed off that I can't take advantage of what I have without it randomly dying on me. Oh yea I even underclocked the core and memory speeds by 20mhz each and it still died on me. I guess very high and ultra settings are working the card too hard but wtf is it supposed to be there for in the first place? Anyone have any suggestions, experience, or input on the matter?

 

[dajet24]

In my experience sudden shut downs or reboots tend to point to power supply problems...

That said seeing you have a good Corsair power supply i would be surprised if it had failed given your less then heavy load.

Maybe grab a old powersupply or buy one and then return it after testing it in your system if the shutdowns continue then you can look into other culprits.

just my opinion.

 

[rapperwith1p]

That very well may be the case but I have no spare PSUs to test with and money is a little tight right now. Also, I overlooked the psu because the system seems stable while multitasking and not gaming thus why I attributed the problem to a heat issue.

 

[-PK-]

The temps don't sound like an issue at all. You would see heavy artifacting if the card was overheating at such a low temp because that would mean the heatsinks weren't seated properly or it has bad vram, and it certainly wouldn't cause your pc to restart at 70C.

Sounds like the power supply, you might be able to use voltage monitoring software to check for out of spec voltages under heavy load (gaming). Or depending on how random the resets are, the motherboard could be putting out too low of a voltage to the cpu or ram which would lead to software calculation errors and possibly resets. But considering it appears to happen only when gaming, I would check the power supply first.

 

[dajet24]

Corsair is pretty stand up company call the support line see if they would be willing to help you check the supply in some way. got nothen to lose. i find when videocards are to hot or to far clocked Windows simply gives that video adapter had failed/ recovered message and the game freezes(though you may be stuck and have to manually reboot) not auto system shutdown/reboot. so i dont think your card is to blame for this.

 

[rapperwith1p]

Hm, so I did a number of reformats going back from XP to Vista and Vista to XP etc and eventually came back to Vista. I'm in the process of installing stuff but thought I'd give folding a try and see if it shuts down. Well I've ran it for a few mins now and it hasn't given me any problems at all and I'm just baffled I'm going to install a game in a bit and see if it'll shut down on me but folding seems to be ok on the card.

Would being able to fold on the card without any problems be an indication that the card isn't the problem at all? Here's a screen of it folding and the readings from GPU-Z. Oh and can folding on the card have any major negative impact on the card down the line?



Didn't get the GPU-Z screen in the other pic so here's one of it about 10-15 mins after the other screenshot was taken. Never seems to go over 76c from this point on.