hi guys,i have recently built my own pc from scratch,everything went fine in the building process but i am having problems with my pci express card.It seems to be overheating even though i have bought a huge gaming case with six fans inside and a temp monitoring system built into it for processor vga and hard drive readouts.My specs are....epox 8npa sli n force 4 motherboard,amd sempron 3400+ 64 bit architecture socket 754,albatron geforce 7100 pci express graphics card,1 gig pc 3200 400mhz,550w psu,6 fans 2 rear 2 top 1 side 1 front, i have not overclocked any of the hardware yet but i was trying to push the system to see what it could handle and what temperatures i was running.As a test i played tiger woods 2007 on its highest res with the game graphics set to best quality instead of best performance.it was going fine until the ninth hole then i started getting white lines down the screen,processor temp 28c, hard drive 35c, graphics card 52c.i let it all cool down and then tried generals on a skirmish and put maximum armies on,ten minutes into the game and the vga temp shot up to 53c and then the game cut off telling me my graphics hardware is overheating...please help as i dont think the graphics card should be running that hot and i dont know how to correct the problem...

That's not really that hot for a videocard these days. My 6800 has a thermal cutoff of 135c... And it idles around 70. If you wan't it cooler, just slap a fan on top of the stock heatsink.

Yeah your videocard is actualy pretty cool for the specs it has...

My temps are usualy around what MetalX has when I play Oblivion but I didnt have alot of fans back befor I added Water cooling

thnx very much guys much appreciated,i do any of you have any ideas why it keeps cutting off when it gets to that temp.is there a setting in the bios or something or do i have to have thunder probe set to a higher temp or something.im quite confused about how to fix the problem other than puting a fan on top like you guys said,i will try a fan and let you know the results..

how do u check the temp

Well, there is the possibility that the card is displaying the wrong temp and is in fact much hotter than that. If that is happening, maybe you should remove the heatsink, put some artic silver (or any silver thermal grease they all do the same thing) on the GPU and relplace the heatsink. Also, I really do think you should "slap a fan on top of the stock heatsink," to quote myself. If you cannot find anywhere to screw one on, just tape it or something. Crude and ugly, but it worked for me. If you really want it to look good you might think about investing in a new GPU cooler from a third party such as Zalman or TT or otherwise.