Video card temperature monitor?

[Mike Fishcake]

I've just got a 512MB Gigabyte branded 7600GS video card with passive cooling, and was wondering if there was any way of monitoring the temperature of the card? Are there usually temperature monitors built in to these sorts of cards?

I've got a couple of chassis fans in my case with a fan controller, and I want to turn the speed of the fans down a bit to reduce the noise, but I don't want to turn it down so much that the card gets too hot.

I don't want to have to buy one of those external thermometer things, but if it's something quick and easy to do, it would be nice to quieten down the system a bit.

If this is possible, what sort of temperature range should I be looking at? I don't do overclocking BTW

[aidanjt]

Your drivers should have a basic GPU temp display.

[Mike Fishcake]

That simple? Lovely. Downloaded the latest forceware drivers from nVidia anyway, so I'll check that out. I obviously didn't look hard enough.

Any idea what sort of safe temperature range I should be looking at?

[kalniel]

Any idea what sort of safe temperature range I should be looking at?

With a passive card you only need to stress when it gets to about 130C - the drivers themselves will have a thermal slow/shutdown threshold (that you can adjust) but it'll be about 135C by default.

Idle temps could be quite low, but expect it to go a lot higher at load and only reduce relatively slowly after load.

[Mike Fishcake]

Once again, thanks.

I'll give it a try when I get home.

[Blitzen]

Your drivers should have a basic GPU temp display.

Only any good if you have a die sensor on the card though.

[kalniel]

The 7600GS should do.

[Mike Fishcake]

Yep, it does!

Thanks again peoples!

[aidanjt]

No probs.

[adam1701]

I have a 7900GS and the most i have ever seen when playing games is 52 degrees centigrade!

[eggman]

yeh it shouldnt be going over the 90oC mark really, otherwise something is wrong. mine is always around 30-40oC.

[kalniel]

Are yours passively cooled?

[Mike Fishcake]

If anyone's even remotely interested...

Can't remember the numbers exactly, but the card seemed to do about 35 degrees at bootup, gradually creeping up to the mid-50s.

Ran 3dMark03 a couple of times, got it up to about 62 degrees. Turned the fans down a bit, ran it again, peaked at 71, then cooled back down to 58-60ish not long after exiting 3Dmark. Even if I really hammer it with hours of 3D stuff, I'm perfectly happy that it will survive

I'm mostly planning on doing video editing in Premiere Elements anyway, and that doesn't really bother the GPU at all.

Plus there's thermally controlled speed throttling, so when it gets up to 125 degrees, it slows itself down.