For the past 4 months or so I get random black or green screens of death during gaming, upon attempting to reboot my PC beeps a few times and fails to POST, The only way I get it to work again is by holding power button until it powers down, then turn back on.
 
Videocard is a EVGA GTX 260 Superclocked edition and Ive never overclocked it beyond its factory clock speeds.
 
I recently upgraded my motherboard,cpu and memory but this random crashing occurred on the previous system as well.
 
Today I was playing Crysis with evga precision running in the background and noticed the GPU was reaching 94C even with the fanspeed manually set at 100% ?? My PC eventually crashes after 10 minutes or so of playing, the only way Ive been able to prevent Crysis from crashing is to drop the resolution from my usual 1600x1024 to 1280x800. (GPU doesnt run quite as hot).
 
Im running 196.21 nvidia driver.
 
I was thinking about taking the card apart and re seating the heatsink with Arctic silver 5 but I don't want to void the warranty, should I just RMA?
 
Any ideas appreciated.
 
i7 920 @ 3.2ghz
6GB Corsair DDR3 1600
EVGA GTX 260 Superclocked edition
RealtekHD audio (onboard)
Win7 64bit Ultimate.

Danielsundin

As long as you dont break the PCV or any other part physically, (Flash bios the exception, this is not physical but still void warranty) it's covered by warranty. Open 'er up blow some compressed air around that heatsink, refresh thermal grease and 'ol betty should work like a charm again, if still not operating as it did before "weird screens" then it is time to RMA, indeed.

Oh I wasnt sure if opening would void warranty, This is good news then being im comfortable with doing these types of fixes, I havent experianced any graphic glitches as of yet so hopefully it does the trick.
 
The card currently idles at 57C with Fan speed set on Auto.

 thats pretty high bro i have a gtx 260 sc my idle is at 40c with overclock of 766/1595/1200 and 55c at load of mw2 and bfbc2 you should try re seating the heatsink and reapplying new thermal paste, also when i ran that driver my card was overheating like crazy! 

Replace the TIM with mx2 or 3, clean all the dust out of your gpu, alot of time the fan gets clogged up or the heat sinks by the fan get a nice collection of dust bunnies. If you do both of these things and the issue continues it may be time for an rma.

Ouch well looks like I was having air flow issues, Took the card apart and discovered the heatsink had partial blockage (Cat hair perhaps? Ugh):



Cleaned it all out and cleaned off the stock grease on GPU, Applied AS5, So far the temps are much better and I was able to play Crysis without any crashing tonight (GPU temp hit 80C,not bad considering I watched it hit 99C before cleaning card today!). For what its worth the stock grease didnt seem bad, it was still soft and easy to remove.
 

donta1979

Yeah about this time i notice alot of people are cooking thier 260/280 cards, I have a cat and a rabbit "Mr Bun Bun" I have to clean my gpus every 2-3 months from hair. With the buildup you had in your gpu it may be time to clean out your entire case fans etc, to help get your airflow back on track, if you have 92+ cfm fans in your machines case you should be ablt to drop the temps in crysis about 5-10c. I dont like using AS 5 for gpus MX2/3 seems to work alot better tbh. Im sure there are better tims out there but I go what works for me that lets me apply the tim close to how it was factory. Oh and slam your gpu fan up to 90-100% while you game.

We have 2 cats here so I'm guessing that's what caused or contributed to the buildup, Im hoping the air filter on my case will help slow the process, I had removed it months ago for reasons unknown but put it back in today.
 
I just happen to have AS5 here which is why I used it but I may redo it with MX2/3 in the summer time. Thanks for the info.
 
I have the card back to its default "Superclocked" speeds instead of being underclocked, So far so good.

Yea, at the least, a case should be throughly blown out every month. We enthusiasts spend bloody amounts of money on these machines, and then neglect to clean them out. Do yourselves a favor and hug your computer once a month.

JWhitton

Ouch well looks like I was having air flow issues, Took the card apart and discovered the heatsink had partial blockage (Cat hair perhaps? Ugh):



Cleaned it all out and cleaned off the stock grease on GPU, Applied AS5, So far the temps are much better and I was able to play Crysis without any crashing tonight (GPU temp hit 80C,not bad considering I watched it hit 99C before cleaning card today!). For what its worth the stock grease didnt seem bad, it was still soft and easy to remove.
 

That's just nasty, looks like a hairball lol. 
At least you found the problem, hopefully the card will continue to serve you well.
 
 
 
OT: @Dotna1979, "Mr Bun Bun", seriously?

JeffreyHam

Congratz on finding the problem and resolving it.

 +1  Good job!         

What also helps prevent this is a good high quality case with good air flow and dust filters on the intake fans.

You've opened up a very old thread closed two years ago. I'll lock this thread and ask that you start a fresh thread on this subject. Please list all of your system specs to include make and model of PSU