Question about my video card temperature

[gexecuter]

so i bought an ECS geforce 6200 video card some months ago (thanks google) and everything was going fine except for the last few days when i noticed something strange. I was playing some old game and i noticed some slow down which is odd because it had never happened before and i am pretty picky with that sort of thing. Since i sensed something wrong i checked the GPU temperature with GPU-Z and it was over 69 Cº! it was the highest that i had ever seen. The card doesn't have a fan only a disperser or whatever that thing is called, here in chile is summer so that probably adds a couple of degrees to the overall hotness. I have read conflicting reports on the internet about the maximum temperature this card should get so i am asking at what temp should i be worried? Any thoughts?

[Subsailor]

According to this thread Tweakguides Forum your video card temperature is perfectly fine.

Good luck!

[gexecuter]

I actually saw that thread before making this thread, i just wanted to get a second opinion. I guess that means the slowdown is coming from somewhere else...maybe i need to defrag my hard drive and do other maintenance tasks. Anyway thanks for the help.

[mouser]

some motherboards are configured to slow down the processor if they get too hot.

[gexecuter]

some motherboards are configured to slow down the processor if they get too hot.

Yeah i just checked the bios, i saw nothing like that in there. I defragmented the hard drive where my games are installed and i saw a slight drop in the slowdowns i get. I will probably format the C: disk and install Windows XP again. If the slowdowns persist then that means it's a hardware problems and i will be screwed. Hopefully it's just a Windows problem.

[Carol Haynes]

I have a variety of BFG GeForce 7300GTOC cards and they are regularly that sort of temperature (even with a fan). Doesn't seem to cause a problem though.

Biggest problem I have is that the fans a very noisy and replacing them means sending the cards back to BFG as they won't supply replacements and they carry a lifetime warranty which would be invalidated if I use an alternative fan assembly. Shame they can't install better quality fans!

[nosh]

gexecuter,

I had a GEForce 6200 and it drove me nuts with overheating problems, causing crashes whenever I used anything graphics intensive (which for some reason also included scrolling a web page with Firefox 2  ). It took me a while to figure out it was an overheating problem - the fix I used was crude but 100% effective - I attached a tiny fan blowing into the heatsink using a piece of string.

Can't recall the exact temperatures it was hitting but it was way over 69C IIRC, so your problem could very likely be something else.

[gexecuter]

So today i remembered that one of the first things i did when i got the card was to run it trough GPU-Z. GPU-Z allows you to send your results into an online database so i though i'll check my old results VS the one i get now.

Old GPU-Z result

New GPU-Z result

Notice something different? let me give you a hint: The damn memory clock is overclocked by 100% no wonder i had slowdowns since my little card can't take such speeds, i got lucky that my card didn't fried or something. I have no idea how the overclock happened since i don't even know how to overclock so how do i set the memory clock back to how it was before? Any software i can use? this sucks :/

Edit: I downloaded and installed RivaTuner and used this guide in order to drop the memory clock by 5 MHZ using the driver mode. I was going to drop it to 266 MHZ at once but i didn't know if that was prudent so should i drop the memory clock in 5MHZ each time or should i drop it all at once? never done this kinda of thing before.

[Shades]

Doesn't the driver software for nVidia cards contain a software-based overclocker? (belong to the ATI cult myself)

This Google search will reveal more 

[gexecuter]

Doesn't the driver software for nVidia cards contain a software-based overclocker? (belong to the ATI cult myself)

This Google search will reveal more 

I actually installed Ntune. It looked just like the nvidia control panel that i already had, i couldn't find the overclocking options so i went back to Rivatuner. Using RivaTuner i was finally able to drop the memory clock to 270 MHZ. Unfortunately RivaTuner couldn't make the changes permanent which is what i wanted, it had to install a little startup entry in order to set the memory clock every time Windows booted. It sucks but it's the best i can do for now.
I will probably have to mess with the video card bios so i don't have to use Rivatuner anymore, i will probably do it later tough.

[Shades]

I know there are tools that can actually write their settings into the video card BIOS. Thought that Ntune or indeed RivaTuner could do such a thing.

Sorry, my bad.

Personally speaking, my head is totally not into overclocking. If I require the speed for anything in my PC I will get the components that can deliver by default. In general I carry the opinion that when you start overclocking, you deserve every trouble you get.

[gexecuter]

So i though i'll give you guys a little update on what happened. finally i decided to simply reformat and install Windows again, not a subtle solution but hey it works most of the time. Instead of installing the newest drivers available for my video card i choosed to go with the ones that came on the CD.A quick run of GPU-Z confirmed that i made the right choice since the memory clocks were as they should. I think what happened is that the 170.24 forceware drivers overclocked my card without me knowing and caused the slowdowns (seriously WTF?) so i won't be installing that driver version anymore. It won't be a big loss since i didn't perceive any framerate improvement using the newest drivers so i am gonna go old school. I consider this matter closed so thanks everyone for the help.