Hello

My coments throughout


>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Wendy Brown" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Monday, November 20, 2000 6:31 AM
>Subject: [PCBUILD] Overheating Asus G-Force Video Card??


> Hello to all,
>
> My son (a gamer!) is having a problem with freezes and his monitor display
> when playing Quake III, Halflife, Deltaforce Land Warrior, etc.....  

Very intense system demanding games that will push components into
full uses and maximum power consumption  and heat 

>He is
> concerned that it may be his Asus V6600 G-Force SGRAM video card.  
>His system
> includes an Asus K7M MOBO,  650 Athlon cpu, 128 SDRAM, Asus V6600 G-Force
> SGRAM video card (approx 9 months old), US Robotics 56K modem, 
>Sound Blaster
> Live soundcard, Linksys 10/100 NIC, 40x Memorex CD rom, Samsung 6x DVD,
> 8x4x32 HP CD burner, running Windows 98 first edition on a home 
>network(his
> is NOT the server) running Winproxy (with DSL).  He has the most current
>BIOS and driver updates for his MOBO and video card, but has already tried
>various combinations of previous drivers with the same results of freezes, etc.
>His problem is that he freezes approx. 5 min into a game (even using the
>lowest settings in the game) and continues periodically after that.  After a
>reboot, he sometimes gets a green spectrum across the top of his desktop and the
>temp of the card reads at 175 when it should only be about 149.  He knows its
> overheating, but can't figure out why. 

This is surely an overheating problem! These are  excellent components
but some of the physically hottest around. Athlon, GeForce, SB Live,
CD Burner even the modem are hot in their class. Just look at the
heatsinks on such components.  And if cooler air isn't moving over
those chips and heatsinks and finding its way out of the case the
heatsinks don't do much good.

Those who OVERclock such a rig instantly have to solve even MORE
problems like these!

Its probable that your  case like most computer cases isn't
particularly of good thermal design, the cable arrangement and the
cards in the slots block air circulation and the fans are probably too
few and inadequate. Even the hard drives are at risk of catastrophic
failure in such an oven. And some brands of hard drive like Seagate
for instance are scorchers themselves. Significan heat sources.

As speed and performance go up so does power requirements and heat.
Everything is NOT getting smaller and cooler. Ever wonder why they
don't call them Laptops any more but notebooks instead? How about hot
potato?

> He runs Smart Doctor all the time,
> which is apparently suppose to keep the card from overheating, but still,
>it  overheats and freezes.  Without Smart Doctor running, it also overheats
>and freezes. 

That would be some kind of software CPU cooler or a similar software
but that cools dedicated graphics processors.  These work by turning
off unused regions of the chip during periods of INactivity. Helps not
at all during intense game playing which utilize all that  the CPU and
Graphics card can deliver.

> He has written Asus twice for technical support, but has yet to get
> a reply.  Since they don't have a USA or Canandian support location, we
> have

They do have excellent if a bit slow WEB SITES. However with few
exceptions they support only through dealers and distributors. They
have excellent high paid engineering staff but do not maintain a
boiler room of phone support trainees reading off a knowledge base.
And I expect they would immediately recognize this as not their
equipment at fault.

So I would not expect much in the way of end user support from Asus.m
Its not their business model. And frankly this is likely a problem of
system integration and their equipment is not likely to blame. 

> not yet tried to call for support.  

Unless you need a new BIOS chip or RMA for a board definitely proven
bad In general you can't expect phone or email support from Asus. They
are famous for this, They make and (indirectly) sell  a lot of
advanced high quality complex components at low margin. And they
support through their vendor chain.  Other companies do it
differently.  Personally I use a lot of Asus products. Find them among
the best.

(There is an excellent very active unmoderated forum devoted to
troubleshooting Asus components. This is the newsgroup
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus which also discusses Asus video cards.
In general the problems are solvable.)

>Any advice or suggestions would be
> greatly appreciated.  As a note, he tells me that he had occasional
>freezes
> when he first installed the card last March, but after he starting running
> Smart Doctor, the freezes stopped until a couple of months ago 

The "Smart Doctor" software likely improved a marginal heat situation
somewhat but you still have way to much heat in there.

>and have been getting more frequent.  

If you added or add any more hardware those produce heat too

>Also, he sometimes gets the illegal operation
> message.

Again this sounds like heat.  But yes also  ANY  nVidia GeForce cards
are a bit twitchy and yeah there have been problems integrating them
into Athlon systems including K7M. 

You should describe  your case  and PS and hard drives.  and what fans
and fan mounting positions you have.  A system loaded like this
usually needs CPU Fan, Power supply fan,  auxiliary case exhaust fan
or two and maybe a fan blowing in from the front. (though sometimes
that last makes the air very confused and doesnt help.) 

As has been said PCI slot 1 next to the video card  should probably be
empty and maybe you better see there is good airflowpath by the card
or even an extra fan.  With all the cables in a small case if they are
not tidy this can really cut down on airflow.  

Its also possible that you have an inadequate heatsink fan for the
Athlon or poor thermal contact between CPU and heatsink. This also can
cause freezes and lockups etc especially with intense use like games.

I am presuming your power supply is adequate for this. And that the
RAM is not marginal.

Best you do for us an inventory of the fans and places for  fan , tell
the form of your case and  the number and type of drive bays in your
case or its brand and model #. And if your hard drive(s) are hot ones.

I'd say there is a 90% chance the problem is simply heat. The card is
designed to run "hot" (in all ways) but depends on you, your case and
fans etc to remove that heat. Its common in the industry to ignore
those simple low-tech components. 

Mark Paulson

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