I heard 65 deg. Celsius is where most vid cards start incurring damage. I also heard NVidia cards can operate under 70 Celsius (as opposed to AMD I guess where 65 would be maxxed out). I was also told nvidias can operate relatively safely in the high 60s' (Celsius). Do these numbers sound right? What do you operate at? Any thoughts on the matter? Holler or just say hi...

I don't run gpu's or cpu's higher than 70c EVER. The higher you run the temps the faster they break. Resistance makes heat, heat makes more resistance and around and around you go till RMA time.

joeymir

wmmills
I don't run gpu's or cpu's higher than 70c EVER. The higher you run the temps the faster they break. Resistance makes heat, heat makes more resistance and around and around you go till RMA time.

I will agree with mills. I personally always try to stay under 75C at all times. Truth is though, most stock fan profiles on GPU's will allow the card to reach close to 85C before fans really start ramping up. What wmmwills in theory should be accurate, but there is plenty of cards that run super high temps that last forever, and cards that are kept cooler, yet die faster, so chalk that up to luck of the draw. I had an old pair of Geforce 7800 GTX cards back in 05/06/07, and in SLI those cards reached 93C almost constantly everytime I played Oblivion which I played religiously. never had an issue. Retired those cards into a secondary, they ran for a few more years before they were sold on craigslist. Hec most people will upgrade after 3 years as it is, if not sooner! 

Yep my GTX 970 constantly ran up to 80 and I never had issues. I think some people are irrationally afraid.

From actual experience on my SLI setup, my GTX 680 Classified runs at ~80C at ~35% fans speed out of the box. It hovers around that on moderate gaming or around 60-70% GPU use for both cards.
 
On a side note, the other GTX 680 4GB OC (MSI Twin Frozr) hovers around that same temperature at ~65% fan speed but the cooling solution is a dual fan and only one of them works until it reaches 85% for the second to kick in. Once again, out of the box. Dunno at what temp it gets to 85%, I just tested this with Afterburner to find out when I suspected a faulty second fan.
 
The MSI is the one on top and sandwiched between the huge CPU cooler and the EVGA which is under it.
 
If those are on factory settings and with OC, then it is safe to at least say 80C is more than safe. Nvidia says max is 98C for these. and 80C is 28C less than that.
 
I made a custom fan speed but when I noticed how quiet the fans are on factory settings I went ahead and tested it to get the above results. They are stable and much lower than the max temp so I kept it that way. They survived all this time so I figured stable 80C at such low fan speeds is fine.

Oh come on.. we are speaking about "safe" not perfect temps at max load. 80-90degreee is perfectly safe! ! !  Anything above will be loud and not that safe... But your GPU Mhz will drop at peak / extreme temps.