Video Card Death?

decidence

decidence

Genkai Conqueror
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After restarting my computer because of some Windows Updates I got this:

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I've gotten it before after a restart (about a month ago) but I just rebooted and the problem went away.

However this time I tried rebooting several times, shutting down completely and starting up.. nothing worked. So I took the video card out of my system, blew it off, tried to get dust out of the fan as much as possible and put it back in to find my video is fine again.

Any bets on how long the video card is going to last now?
 
Maybe it just somehow worked its way loose. I had a RAM stick do that before, causing constant crashes without me knowing why, took out both my sticks, put them back in, never crashed again.
 
I've had that before, not sure what I did to fix it. Think I ended up reseating everything. I don't know if the act of reseating things worked, or removing power for a bit did it.
 
Take yer RAM and vid card out of your machine and clean the connectors with a pencil eraser.
Re-seat the card, should fix the problem.
Also, check your northbridge heatsink/fan and make sure its doing its job.
 
lol wow you still use WinMX? lol


i don't think is RAM problem, is Graphic card, but ya, cleaning dust out is the best way, if nothing work, then ya, dead card, get a new one! :p
 
How old is the video card? Does it have a stock heatsink?

Video cards usually have low-profile coolers so that they don't occupy the slot next to them. Low-profile coolers means smaller, more compact bearings. These wear out a lot faster than your typical CPU heatsink fan.

There is a possibility your video card's fan is reaching it's end of life. If that's the case, the heatsink will collect dust faster (less airflow to push it off the heatsink) and thus will develop heat traps and overheat.

Replacing the GPU cooler is not difficult nor expensive, 30 minutes and $50 are both exaggerations. Detail what kind of card you have and we can recommend a replacement cooler.

I've never seen a video card outright "die". I've seen them crash a lot due to overheating, but modern cards have safety-checks in place that will automatically shut the card down if it's overheating so it does not suffer permanent damage.
 
CmdrFly said:
How old is the video card? Does it have a stock heatsink?

Video cards usually have low-profile coolers so that they don't occupy the slot next to them. Low-profile coolers means smaller, more compact bearings. These wear out a lot faster than your typical CPU heatsink fan.

There is a possibility your video card's fan is reaching it's end of life. If that's the case, the heatsink will collect dust faster (less airflow to push it off the heatsink) and thus will develop heat traps and overheat.

Replacing the GPU cooler is not difficult nor expensive, 30 minutes and $50 are both exaggerations. Detail what kind of card you have and we can recommend a replacement cooler.

I've never seen a video card outright "die". I've seen them crash a lot due to overheating, but modern cards have safety-checks in place that will automatically shut the card down if it's overheating so it does not suffer permanent damage.
Click to expand...


Do you know what at the Limit before "overheating" my "Slowdown Threshold" is at 115ºC and i reached 82ºC before without any warning lol or crashes :P

Water cooling is the best, i wish i had water cooling on my GPU :/
 
I don't know the exact threshold where a video card teeters over into unsafe temperatures, but GPUs can generally withstand much higher temps than CPUs.

My X1900 hits 85-95 °C in heavy shit like Oblivion, and suffers no glitches or instabilities. However AMD CPUs (I can't give you the specs on Intel ones, don't know them well enough) start to become unstable at 65 °C and will begin to suffer permanent damage at 90 °C.
 
Video Card is not THAT old. ATI X800 Pro 256mb.

No I don't use WinMX that often but it's a decent last resort source. I usually just get full album torrents and select the songs I want when downloading.
 
X800 shouldn't be having problems already. When you pulled the card out, did you try to spin the fan manually with your fingers? If so, was there any resistance? Easy way to tell if the bearings are going is if you spin the fan and it comes to a sudden abrupt stop rather than smoothly gliding into it's resting position.
 
my mainboard fan (a chips that is between 2 PCIE slot) had some resistance on it when it turn D: couldn't clean the dust out T.T or lacking of grease? :P
 
It's a really small flat fan? Sounds like your northbridge cooler.

I should have chosen my words more carefully, resistance is tougher to gauge on low-profile fans.

If it smoothly glides into it's resting position after you spin it, it's fine. If it abruptly stops and doesn't kind of rock back and forth before stopping, then yeah it's probably got some issues.

I don't know if you can grease these bearings, I've never heard of people doing this but I've never tried it myself. The cost of a new heatsink/fan unit is usually nothing too staggering so I generally opt to go the replacement route myself.
 
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