Overheating nVidia card

[obsidian]

My nVidia GTX 280 is overheating when running games. I noticed it after I recently updated the latest stable forceware drivers (258.96) so I think that may be the issue. I reverted back to the previous version (197.45, I think) but that still causes the overheating, I suppose perhaps because it may not be completely reverted. I tried uninstalling the driver and reinstalling but that doesn't help. I haven't tried a full OS reinstall, I'm a little reluctant to do that since it's a lot of work.

I'm wondering if anyone else has problems with the latest forceware drivers causing more heat to your system than before. I think it's unlikely to be hardware related, I did clean it out with some compressed air and it seems as if I only had problems since updating, but hardware problems might still be an possibility. I'm open to any suggestions.

[SoM]

i'm using 258.96 drv with a EVGA GT 220GT 1 GIG, check your thermal paste.

[Scourge]

No problems with my GTX 260 on the latest drivers so far. Of course I normally bump up my fan to around 75 to 80%.

[AmIdYfReAk]

i would manually set the fan speed on it, After removing it from the case and blowing it out.

[Foo]

an possibility

[^Ghost]

ive had problems with my gtx 275, in some games like cod4 modern warfare, temperature would immediately rise to +80 degrees Celsius, after about 5 minutes of gameplay. from what i read on most forums, its mostly a hardware issue; ie: small cases, fans etc.. i fixed my issue to have 4 of 6 fans going in while the other 2 go out, and have my gfx fan run at 50%.

[Captain]

I was running an overclocked GTX275 with stock cooling in a mid-ATX case and never had temp issues.

[obsidian]

I've previously ran games like Crysis for hours on end without problems. It would heat up a lot as expected, but I never had actual problems. Now when playing games like L4D2 (not especially graphics intensive), my screen will go all wacky and computer will freeze up forcing a hard reboot. Currently, it will do okay if I have the fan ramped up to something much higher than what I had to do before.

I think I'm going to take it apart this week and see if there is a giant dust bunny or a heatsink delaminating that is causing physical problems. Hopefully it's not actually damaged hardware, though I think BFG has lifetime warranties.

[AmIdYfReAk]

BFG is no longer.... Good luck with that RMA

[SoM]

aye, they stopped doing that like almost a year ago or more ?