Lyric

FurMark will only kill your card if you are an idiot with the program, and go to sleep with it running all night like a lot of people do to "test" stability.

To test stability on a video card when overclocking, you don't walk away from the computer EVER or goto sleep while doing this, because if it starts artifacting really bad, and sits there artifacting for hours while you are away, or sleeping. Your card will be royally screwed.

eltacopirata

I know what artifacting is. However, the XFX cards are artifacting in an abnormal way, thus an explanation of how it is artifacting is helpful.

And no, video cards cannot handle over 100C without causing damage over time. I didn't say that 65C was too much, I just said that is when I think my temps start to get out of control.

As for acceptable operating temperatures, it's merely a matter of opinion so long as you keep them within a reasonable range (and 80C+ is not a reasonable range, sorry, but my card will crash at those temps).

Really, if you know how to use RivaTuner, you can get your card to operate at mid 60s or below without even maxing out the fan (and still operating at a reasonable sound level). Why would you want higher when you can easily control it to lower temps?

Obviously, Corder is having problems like me, problems that can be helped to some degree by keeping the card at temps that won't contribute to a crash. As for the artifacting itself, yes, lowering the clock speeds will help, but that should only be a temporary solution until you get an RMA (assuming that you want to RMA the card if it can't handle the factory overclock).

Corder

Did the same thing - 650 = stable at any temp.

Found a guy near me who overclocked this card to 692 and stable.

What do you think about trying out his bios into my card, can it help?
We checked our bioses we have same version, but still, maby give it a try?

XFX answered me after 10 hours. Adviced to make fan speed profiles OR decrease clocks.

tonyp2000

I had the same problem. I bought the black edition and it crashed at 80c on all games. I thought the card was faulty so I bought another one and was going to send the other back but when I tryed that it did the exact same think so then I thought it must be my power supply. It was an 800 watt I had in and as 2X12 rails at 20 amp, so I bought a Tagan 1100 watt and is worked fine for a week then it crashed on me again. Im going to try them in SLI when I get round to it.

When both cards get to 80c they pulling around 80 amps.

tonyp2000

I forgot to say the BIOS version of both of mine is 62.00.1A.00.93

NYJCroo

I noticed that this thread kind of died out. I have a BE and it's been perfectly fine for the first several months, and in all games (ostensibly at all temps, though I don't actively monitor and push my fan up to at least 60% when gaming). It wasn't until I wanted to show my lil bro Crysis (which my old system of two 640mb 8800gts' played decently enough) that I found that Crysis will crash after a few minutes of play. This was a clean game install, followed by the two patches and then that natural mod deal (and I tested it w/o the mod too) and it just crashes... Vista stays running without issue. I tried putting the fan to 90%, crash; tried downclocking to 650, crash; I even (I may be lying about the clock here) downed to 260 stock and ran through the two cpu and one gpu benchmarks for it... cpu's were fine, gpu crashes after 2 - 3 passes. Has anyone found a workable solution for this damn thing? What's odd to me is that I play Oblivion all the time, and no issues, and I even (after this crysis debacle) installed Far Cry 2 to test with that (haven't played yet, but I thought they were built using the same engine) and now my little brother is loving the hell out of that for hours at a time... any help?

NYJCroo

Did you, OP, ever find a solution better than downclocking? That would really piss me off.

NYJCroo

was this never re-visited? Did people just downclock and forget it? ***?!

Corder

Ok, so it's me thread maker. Seems like I was the most interested in XFX GTX260 BE problems guy here. So, basically yeah, i just downclocked to 649Mhz with EVGA Precision.

For kinda 2 month I was trying to manage the problem with XFX support, even when solution with downclocking was found. They were advicing LOTS of stupid crappy stuff and at the end they finally adviced me to downclock, so I was really tired of graphic card problem that days so forget about that discussion, then they sent me lots of messeges telling that if problem still isn't solved I should contact them, but i really was tired and so didn't respond.

Funny fact, while this problem I even was at lawyer's office trying to regulate this problem by law, but when downclocking helped screw the thing up. So actually we still are unsatisfied clients of xfx. But doesn't matter too sic of the problem.

NYJCroo, so as I understood your Crysis just crashes, windows still working fine? If that's true our GPU problem doesn't matter. Problem is in something different like drivers or whatever. Downclocking solved the problem when GPU overheated at 80C and showed screen filled with random color after you could only manually restart PC. So game crash is totally different. I finished Crysis and Warhead after downclocking fine.

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Crooksy

so is it unstable clocks or is it the heat?

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