Worryingly hot GPU, recommended cooler?

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Tacitus

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Hi,

I have a Nvidia Gigabyte Geforce 7800GT. It used to idle at about 43 degrees and hit about 55-60 when playing demanding games in the winter. I thought this was pretty hot, but acceptable. Now the summer has come however the card is at about 70-75 degrees Celsius when gaming, and my computer often crashes when these temperatures are reached. I've had to remove the side panel and blow a fan into the computer to avoid this happening. (I'm assuming these increased temps are due to the summer, as the GPU fan appears to be fine, and the ambient heat combined with all my electrical heat makes my room like an oven)

Clearly, I don’t want to be doing this for 4 months of every year, especially on a computer I’ve paid so much for. Can anyone recommend a good but quiet graphics card cooling solution for me? I can't afford water cooling and I don’t want something ridiculously bulky, just something that is better than the stock piece of garbage I have on at the moment and that would perhaps allow a bit of overclocking later on.

As for fitting a new cooler, how would I go about it? Is it as hard as doing CPU coolers and heatsinks? Can I destroy my card if I do a botch job?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Tacitus
 
I got a normal exhaust fan (120mm), but no intake one (though i have intake grills and a fan mounting. I dont really want to cut a hole in the top of my case for one on top. Do you think its worth getting an intake fan? As all i can see it doin is dragging in warm air.
 
Tacitus said:
I got a normal exhaust fan (120mm), but no intake one (though i have intake grills and a fan mounting. I dont really want to cut a hole in the top of my case for one on top. Do you think its worth getting an intake fan? As all i can see it doin is dragging in warm air.
Warm air > the air from the back of your case, which is 'hot'.
Think of it this way, 30C is a lot less than 70.

Also, Arctic Cooling makes very good GPu coolers, be sure to get the double stack one, where it blows air out the back of your PC, not just blows air off the HS into the mess of your computer.
 
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