graphics card overheating?

[calanorn]

heya,
im not brilliant with computer hardware im studying a national diploma in ICT but have yet to do much concerning hardware but my home computer seems to crash after about 15 minutes of playing a game which i can play on my lap top which has about half the spec the PC.

whenever i play a game it will freeze and give me a blue screen never have time to read what it says but i decided to take a look inside the tower unit and my graphics card has two fans of which only one of them is actually spinning at all my graphics card is an asus radeon 9800xt 256mb the rest of the system spec are also high.

i checked on asus smartdoctor and the GPU is running at 70c and the RAM at 60 the tower is next to an open window with good old 3am british wind pooring in and the side panel removed. those temps are what they are on the desktop just browsing the web not whilst in a game. i was wondering if the second fan is suposed to start after a certain amount of time or if it needs to be set or its broken?.

also the case has 2 built in fans for cooling would this be adaquate or would a new case be needed any advice or recomendations would be much appreciated.

cal

Asus dual DDR, S-ATA motherboard
p4 3.4GHz
2gig RAM
256mb radeon 9800xt
550w PSU

 

[Nitestick]

it could be a number of things. to narrow the field run prime95 (cpu stress test) for a while to make sure it is not errors by the processor that are crashing the game. run memtest86 for at least 3 passes to make sure it is not a memory error that is crashing it. those temps do seem a bit high. are you saying there are 2 fans on the card and one isn't working? if thats the case then you've probably already found the culprit.

 

[calanorn]

what case and new graphics card would you recommend im looking for high end performance and have no objection to a high price preferably not ATI if there is a better nvidia card had to many problems with ati unless im just unlucky

i think it is the graphics card it clocked a GPU temp of 75c just on the desktop so i can only imagine the heat when im in a game like star wars empire at war.

 

[Nitestick]

oh ok so you want a new case and card. my reccomendation, as always is look at ThermalTake cases. they are decent looking at a reasonable choice and are normally very efficient with airflow. not necessarily the best out there but still good. as for the card if you really want something high end, and money is no object then you can't get much better than one of the dual GPU 7800GTX's that are out there. or the 7800gt/gtx. although i suppose that is an AGP motherboard, right? in that case get an AGP 6800gs. if it is PCI-E then stick to what i said before.

 

[turtile]

Thats very hot for Idle. It shouldn't crash until its over 100C though.