Am I stuck with my onbaord gfx forever? (1 Viewer)

[Paranoid Delusion]

GPU temperatures do run higher than anything else on your pc, consistantly get 75-85C on a fan cooled nvidia 7900gs made by bfg, which the fan noise is not even audible with the cover off, and there are quite a few makes with zalman coolers on them, so they should be pretty quiet and give whole system a bit more airflow as well

And just to let you know, Nvidia consider 130c to be the dangerous cutoff temperature for there gpu's, would not have thought ATI not to disimilar, so temperatures in the region of 80-90C is considered normal.

 

[Inker]

Hmm...well I don't know but I really wouldnt want to have anything heat up to 130° inside my pc. High temps make me uncomfortable

Given I'll be on holiday soon, I think I'll wait until after that and try my luck with a HD4650 or 4450, depending on reviews and try to underclock them. They should have the newer decoding engine too then.

 

[bigj]

You prompted me to look up new ATI parts - rv710 looks great for htpc.
I think I'll be waiting a couple more weeks too!

 

[joz]

The problem described here by Inker is just the way it is nowadays with passive cooled cards in mij experience. It's a bit on the high side but I had a x1650XT which ran 60 idle on my PC and about 95 full load after an hour. It's still working (sister is playing some Sims 2 on it from time to time).

Especially the low profile HTPC cards have a smaller heatsink. The core will get hotter because of that (less surface to dissipate heat)

Offcourse a good airflow helps a lot. But that goes for all PC's in general, also actively cooled cards for game PC's etc.