hey folks
last weekend i was sat playing fallout:new vegas on steam when i noticed my pc was making a lot more noise than usual, sounded like the fan was in overdrive
then i noticed a strong smell of hot/burning metal, plastic and solder
i immediately powered off and opened her up, cleaned out a couple of dust bunnies, nothing major
my graphics card was
scorchingly hot, i blew on it with some canned air and let it sit a while before restarting
ever since i have been experiencing severe fps issues on any game with 3d graphics, any of my steam games and wow
but it is not constant, sometimes everything runs fine for the entire day, others fps is fine for maybe 5 minutes before taking the express train to 1 fps town
the fan has not been making any more unusual noise, and the hot metal smell has not returned
i have a strong feeling that my gpu fried but i really dont have the experience with computers to be sure, is there anything that i can do to know for certain?
Posts
2.23 gigs ram
gpu: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GS
I'd recommend cleaning your fan/card/chassis out to make sure there's no dust or hairballs adding to your heat gain. Make sure the vents are clear, and that your GPU fan is set to maximum when playing video-intensive games.
If you can see your video card, look at all the capacitors (small cylinder/silo shaped objects) very closely to see if any have irregular/damaged sides or burn marks.
As a sidenote, don't ever use compressed air on a hot system, especially near the heatsink. Copper expands and contracts rapidly with temperature changes - blasting cooled air over a scorching heatsink could crack it. Let the system cool a bit before blowing compressed gasses into it.
If the GPU is that hot from playing games, i'd highly recommend lowering your in-game graphic options or upgrading your card. Dropping the resolution a notch, disabling anti-aliasing, and lowering shadow quality/number all are mega-savers on your GPU load. Hardware gets warm, sure, but it should never be hot/scorching during play.
Artifacts are a telltale indicator of hardware damage but I'm not so sure they need to be there to diagnose it.
However, when you get to the point of loopy and inconsistent performance even when the card is cool, in my experience is a good indicator that the hardware is on a downward spiral and artifacts are likely to pop up in the future, followed by total failure.
taking it to the shop on monday so we will see what is up
so i picked up a gts 250 and ordered a 500v power supply for it, arriving tomorrow
noice
i guess this can be locked! cheers
I mourn the loss of such a great older generation card. *sniff*.
But anywho, GTS 250, not too shabby. What manufacturer? XFX, EVGA, BFG? Just curious, as I'm an nVidia Fanboy
just installed the new PSU, i forgot to hook up the hard drive the first time i booted it up, whoops
everything seems to be fine, it runs at around 60C playing new vegas on ultra, its quiet and there is only a faint 'hot metal smell' which i am attributing to it being new... pretty happy with it now