Why does Youtube make my grpahics card so hot?

So, I have a gtx 480, which is naturally a hot card, it idles at around 50 degrees Celsius, and the core clock idles at 50.6mhz, although when I happen to watch a Youtube video, my GPU cranks the core clock to 700.1mhz, which is the max, and the gpu idles at 74~ degrees. The GPU then clocks itself back down to idle and the temps fall back to 50~ degrees after the video is finished, I'm looking at my temperatures right now, and its been about 5 minutes after the end of a video and the temps are at 65 degrees and the core clock is at idle, it takes about 10 minutes for it to fall back to 50 degrees. The weird thing is that when I play a game, the temps arent even this bad, I just played a game, and the average temps were around 65-70 degrees. Anyone know what could be causing this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

EDIT: Sorry about the spelling mistake in the title. I cant find a way to edit it.

It's flash basically.

Flash was never originally designed for video playback esp high definition video so it's poorly optimised and uses a brute force approach, that triggers the drivers to put the card into a high load setting.
The temperature taking a while to get back to low idle is the fan speed profile, it's fairly standard, basically under 65c the fan is running slow to keep the noise down but not provide as much cooling so it's taking a while to shed the extra degrees.
Of course this isn't helped by the current hot weather.

Thing to try, update graphics card drivers or down grade graphics card drivers if this is an issue caused by the latest drivers, update flash.

For the temperatures you could make up a custom profile make the fan

Other than that not a great deal you can do.

Flash causes another interesting problem on some cards, it will set the GPU to it's video playback clock, somewhere between idle and load clocks, probably to lower power consumption when playing videos. However, the clock locks at this frequency while a flash video is open, regardless of whether it's actually playing. This kills performance in games; I first discovered this after frame-rate mysteriously tanked on whatever game I was playing at the time, but it seems it's a common problem if you search. Unfortunately it's not very well known, and I imagine loads of people will have some YT videos open in their browser while playing a game...

Try the html5 version of you tube:
http://www.youtube.com/html5/

Ah, alright, thank you everyone! I suspected it had something to do with flash, but I wasnt sure. I also tried the HTML 5 version of youtube, and yeah, it makes a massive difference, thank you kalniel, although not every video supports it =/ Also to watercooled, I never knew that actually happened, well it never has happened to me personally, but I'll keep an eye out just in case my games tank in FPS.

Also worth noting is the fact the flash menu normally allows you to turn off hardware acceleration running off you CPU instead.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jasp

Also worth noting is the fact the flash menu normally allows you to turn off hardware acceleration running off you CPU instead.

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not an ideal situation but handy to know.

What would be the effects of letting flash run off my CPU only?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jasp

Also worth noting is the fact the flash menu normally allows you to turn off hardware acceleration running off you CPU instead.

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Where is that option. Just checked control panel and the flash applet doesnt have an option for that

Ignore me, it's on the right click menu when playing a vid.

Play any video on YouTube, right click, settings, enable hardware acceleration

Using Firefox? Disable hardware acceleration...seemed to boost my card up to it's full gpu and memory speeds, on every new page load. Ultimately caused the drivers to crash and recover for some reason.

Yes, I am using Firefox, I'll try disabling hardware acceleration to see if that helps.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by watercooled

Flash causes another interesting problem on some cards, it will set the GPU to it's video playback clock, somewhere between idle and load clocks, probably to lower power consumption when playing videos. However, the clock locks at this frequency while a flash video is open, regardless of whether it's actually playing. This kills performance in games; I first discovered this after frame-rate mysteriously tanked on whatever game I was playing at the time, but it seems it's a common problem if you search. Unfortunately it's not very well known, and I imagine loads of people will have some YT videos open in their browser while playing a game...

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I was about to post saying this happens to me. For ages I thought there was something wrong with my graphics card until I figured this out. Thing is - steam uses flash!