Massive Artifacting/Crashes

[Yves]

Two weeks ago I put together a new system, and now it seems that my 6600GT video card is suffering massive artifacting within windows and games. It's only intermittent, not all the time. When it happens, it artifacts for a few seconds then crashes the whole system. I've tried the latest Forceware drivers, the Gigabyte Drivers, and older 66.93 Forceware drivers, yet none of these fix the problem.

The card has no fan, just a Gigabyte heatpipe cooling system, so I think it may be temperature related. The software temp sensor in the card properties says that at idle the card is running at 67 Celcius and at load its running 92 Celcius... it seems incredibly high.

Does anyone know what could be wrong? Or is it just a card in need of an RMA? Or a Ram problem even?

These are the parts:
Gigabyte Socket 939 K8NF-9 MBoard
AMD64 Socket939 3000+
2Gb Hyundai PC3200 Ram (2x1Gb)
160gb Seagate 7200 Sata HDD
Geforce 6600GT 128Mb (Gigabyte model GV-NX 66T128VP)

 

[Wolfkin]

To high temperature. I think the 6600GT has a limit of 85 Celcius for stable performance.
Over 90 Celcius is way to high.

 

[TrueRush]

sounds like a cooling problem. try putting more fans in your case to have better airflow. a fan around the videocard should help. if you cant do these options ... you'll have to go ghetto and open up your side panel and use a small house fan to cool it.

 

[Yves]

Thanks for the help, I tried the ghetto option and within 3 minutes the temperatures dropped 20 degrees

 

[BLenderhedd]

Thanks for the help, I tried the ghetto option and within 3 minutes the temperatures dropped 20 degrees

Did that also end the artifacting problem?

 

[Yves]

Did that also end the artifacting problem?

It seems to have fixed it, there's been no more artifacting or crashes.