Video card artifacts...

[X1337]

Well some programs will be accurate and some won't. Usually the one in the ForceWare Control Panel is pretty accurate, so just go with that one. Even then, 77C is pretty darn hot for idle speeds.

Find some time, take the card out, do a maintenance check on it. That means take the heatsink out, check to see if the fan or the heatsink fins are clogged with dust. After you do that, clean the old thermal paste from the card and the heatsink contact plate (just use tissue and dab it with rubbing alcohol), and when it's all clean, apply thermal paste. Make sure you don't apply too much; just a dot the size of a rice grain is the maximum you should go, or it'll insulate the heat, not conduct it. NOTE: Make sure you use Arctic Silver 5 for the GPU core and Arctic Ceramique for the memory, or just Arctic Ceramique for everything. Arctic Silver 5 is conductive, so it'll short out your RAM.

lol, my friend made this like slivery stuff you put on your cpu. And it works like magic. Anyways I own some custom thermal compound and to make it work good you need to take a small glob and spread it around the gpu and you get it on your heatsink it should gave some grip to it and wella!

 

[eViLoNe]

Ok, I took off the cover of my video card and cleaned out a ton of huge chunks of dust and tried to clean it as best as I could. I then tried to play half-life 2 and the game works perfectly fine again. No more artifacts! Thanks for all of your help!

Good stuff! . You may want to do what I do, and open up your computer every now and again, and just clean it out. I notice if I don't do this, I can end up having my CPU and GFX temps shoot sky high.

 

[iceshooter161]

Good stuff! . You may want to do what I do, and open up your computer every now and again, and just clean it out. I notice if I don't do this, I can end up having my CPU and GFX temps shoot sky high.

Yeah I plan on doing that for now on. Thanks for all the help.

 

[alvino]

lol, my friend made this like slivery stuff you put on your cpu. And it works like magic. Anyways I own some custom thermal compound and to make it work good you need to take a small glob and spread it around the gpu and you get it on your heatsink it should gave some grip to it and wella!

No need. All you really need is just a tiny dot on the GPU core, and maybe get a piece of plastic to spread it around, but you don't need to put it on the heatsink.