I have the "eVGA GeForce 285 GTX Overclocked" card on my system, and notice it's been running high temps while playing City of Heroes and other graphic intensive games. I've never overclocked it, just left it at the setting it came with. It hovers around 87c when playing games but had gotten as high as 92c. I took apart my pc, yanked the card, and cleaned the fan with a q-tip and compressed air to make sure the fan was in good shape. I have the fan set at auto, but have tried setting it at 80% with the same results. The card is a few years old. Is it going bad? Would it help to get another identical card and SLI them? Everything is my system has always run a little high (my quad CPUs run about 70c when playing games) and around 58-60c when idling) and I did add a dual monitor to my setup about six months ago.
 
Any advice would be much appreciated!

jderouen


I have the "eVGA GeForce 285 GTX Overclocked" card on my system, and notice it's been running high temps while playing City of Heroes and other graphic intensive games. I've never overclocked it, just left it at the setting it came with. It hovers around 87c when playing games but had gotten as high as 92c. I took apart my pc, yanked the card, and cleaned the fan with a q-tip and compressed air to make sure the fan was in good shape. I have the fan set at auto, but have tried setting it at 80% with the same results. The card is a few years old. Is it going bad? Would it help to get another identical card and SLI them? Everything is my system has always run a little high (my quad CPUs run about 70c when playing games) and around 58-60c when idling) and I did add a dual monitor to my setup about six months ago.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

It could be time to re-do the TIM (thermal paste) on the card.  If it's the original paste from the mfg'r, it's pobably getting dried up.

Mine was overheating ut to 103 degrees I opened the card and cleaned up the headsink, it was full of dust and I put a new thermal paste on it and now it doenst go over 70c while playing game.

jderouen

  I did add a dual monitor to my setup about six months ago.

 
If memory serves, most cards (including the 200 series) don't downclock when running multi-monitors--They "idle" at full speed.
So higher than average temps should be normal in your case.

With a card that old, it's definitely time to take it apart and thoroughly clean everything as well as reapplying thermal paste. I've been using Gelid GC-Extreme recently and it's been wonderful... it has great reviews and it's not too terrible expensive (3.5g for $12).