660GTX idles at 47C

[Baltazar404]

Hi guys!

See if you can help me here.
I have an EVGA 660GTX card (one fan) and it just overheats while playing ANY game.

So I was just playing a few games (Alpha Protocol, FarCry3) and my PC started to blast crazy amount of heat through the fans! First I didn't really care, but then any game after like 20 minutes became very choppy and started to freezing up.

I installed a monitor software (EVGA X) and I saw, that my card doesn't really go below 40, but fluctuates between around 42 - 47 Celsius!
I took apart my computer to see if there is any dust buildup (I got filters on my case) and there was absolutely minimal.
I'm very anal about noise and I got quality fans installed and my CPU also has a CoolerMaster cooler (quite large) and my CPU seems to be fine (*idles at 33C). (AMD 8150FX).

So I took apart my nvidia card, and there was no dust and the thermal paste looked fine. It wasn't dried up. Anyway, I wiped it off and applied new thermal compound (silver).
Put it back together, I even installed another fan on my case (5 fans on it now! ), and while my CPU and components stay nice and cool, my graphics card continues to idle at the same (40-47 Celsius).

Obviously the card isn't getting overheated, because of not enough ventillation in the case. Actually it's quite hot to touch after 5-10 minutes of just having the computer on.

I just deleted all the drivers and did some registry cleaning too and restarted the system. I checked the BIOS nothing seems to be accelerating (it's not overclocked) and I just spent an hour shutting down all sorts of programs and uninstalling a lot of sofware.
Nothing changed! Temperature stays the same. It looks like the graphics card is working as hard without running any games in 2D mode, just like it would in 3D mode.

Anyone has any ideas what is going on?

 

[RCguitarist]

What is your fan profile like in the EVGA PrecisionX program? You may not have it set to provide adequate fan speed on the gpu itself.

 

[Baltazar404]

Tea Urchin - Already done that.
Rcguitarist - My fan profile is "default"- whatever that is, I guess that's the manufacturer's settings.

Now, I actually lowered the clock for both core and memory by 20 mhz.

Here is something new. I put the graphics card into another computer of mine, this is an i5 with Gskill memory (8GB) and also win8.1

The card idles now around 30c. But watch this:
I did get some benchmarking programs and the card's temperature rises to 70C within a minute! It's actually happens within about 15 seconds!

I don't know how to add a picture if that's possible so I copy paste the stress test results:

Geeks3D Furmark:

SCORE:1722 points (28 FPS, 60000 ms)

Max GPU Temp: 71°C

Resolution: 1920x1080 (FS) - AA:0 samples

FPS: min:23, max:31, avg:28 - OPTIONS: DynBkg

GeForce GTX 660/PCIe/SSE2 (10DE-11C0)

9.18.13.4752 (2-5-2015) - GL:nvoglv64

GPU core: 1045 MHz, memory: 2975 MHz

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz

posted it online
http://www.ozone3d.net/gpudb/score.php?which=97070

Looked at similar setups, it looks like I'm getting much worse scores than others:
http://www.geeks3d.com/20120413/furmark-opengl-benchmark-scores-comparative-charts/

If you look at that list, I'm getting worse scores than a GTX480

- EVGA GeForce GTX 480 (GPU@700MHz, mem@1848MHz, max GPU temp:89°C), TPC:105W/405W (on H67 testbed), R296.10 whql (branch r295_43-27, Win 7 64-bit)
- 1758 points (29 FPS)

 

[Baltazar404]

Just did more testing.
This time, I installed Win7 for testing purposes for one of the extra hard drives I got. I get the same results. The idle temperature seems to be fine now, but the card heats up very quickly.
My problem isn't the temperature anymore, but becoming unstable running any 3D program after 1 hour or more usage.

I have almost all games crash at one point or become so choppy and slow, that it's unplayable.
I'm trying to come up with an example -
Let's say I'm playing Farcry3
After 10 minutes, everything seems to be still going well, but wait a few minutes, and I start to get "hickups" in the game. I can actually visually see and hear the card becoming unstable, as I hear small cracking and buzzing noises, and while the fps seems to keep up, I get tearing effect like my sync is off (my sync is on) and mini pauses during the game.
It's quite annoying and I tried turning down the graphics, but it still happening.

I put back my old card (ATI XFX 7770 Ghost) - and while it's a slower and older card - with even the graphics is pushed beyond what is recommended for this card, the game is quite playable and enjoyable.

So I don't know what's going on. I'm gonna try to take it apart one more time and perhaps apply more thermal compound? I thought I put enough on it (a pear size on the main grfx chip).
Otherwise I'm out of ideas, perhaps the card got damaged over a year I've been using, it's never been overclocked. I just recently underclocked it (by 20mhz for core and memory) , because I was getting crashes and someone recommended to try underclocking the card.
It worked to a certain extent, since I'm not crashing to the desktop, but the games run with errors and my computer is blasting heat in the rear and it's all coming from the GPU.