Alarming overheating issues (X800 XT PE)

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Hello everybody,

I've been using this ATI Radeon X800 XT PE (Sapphire) for awhile and never had any issues with it until about two months ago. I only play World of Warcraft, so I couldn't really see if the problems would happen in other games.

At the beginning I would usually get total system freezes while playing the game, mostly only like twice a week, wich didn't worry that much... but I still knew something was going on. Only once during those two months I've had the same thing happen while I was burning a DVD, wich was pretty odd considering that my recent crashes seem to be linked to my video card.

For about two weeks or so, the frequent system freezes have stopped while playing and instead were replaced by temporary freezes (monitor blacking out) and VPU error reports from ATI. It is starting to worry me alot now, sometimes I can get up to three reports within an hour, and then my system can totally freeze again... requiring me to reboot. I've decided to check out the temperature on my Catalyst Control Panel while playing World of Warcraft and, granted I don't know much at all about hardware, the temperature of my video card would go up to 111 celsius! It wouldn't ever go below mid 90s... so I am really worried about this now. The temperature while only doing desktop is 65 celsius, I have no idea if this is normal, a confirmation would be great.

I know it isn't my PSU, it's new and pretty powerful. Nothing much has changed within those 2 months. I bought a new 20' Widescreen (1680x1050 for desktop and gaming) monitor and installed the recent ATI drivers. Can display drivers make a video card go totally crazy like that? I only have one screen available, so I can't really try out different drivers right now... this monitor is kinda weird and doesn't really display anything if I have no drivers installed, unless it is safe to install the new ones without uninstalling the current ones I have.

Any help would me more than appreciated, this is causing me alot of stress and I'd love to find a way to fix this, thank you.
 
From memory my x800pro never went over 70°C under full load. Open up the case and check that the fan's still working and that there's no dust buildup.

In the meantime don't use it under full load, those temperatures are way too high.
 
I checked out the video card and cleaned up all the dust there was (wich wasn't much at all), the fan was still working. Would buying an extra fan for it or something fix it all? Im really wondering how the overheating has started...
 
New drivers push the card to perform at full potential, which stresses the GPU. Try opening ur case up and blowing a desk fan at the card and then checking the temperatures. If they lower, then u will need a new cooler for the card. This is an inexpensive and good-quality cooler for the card.
 
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