Maximizing the "Life" of my Graphics Card

[C0deM0nkey05]

Hello all.

I'll get right down to it.

I've had an Alienware X51 Desktop gaming Pc for about a year and a half. It came with a Geforce GTX 760 Ti OEM graphics card, and that lasted me about 1 and half years. To this day, I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong. I have a new one but I want to make sure this time I try to avoid as much of what I did before to prolong the life of this gpu.

I used to play for very long hours, mostly 6-8. My room is small and gets hot pretty quickly. Going off the readings of Speccy, my card on most game loads was around 80-something degrees. When I first sensed problems on my PC, the temps. changed and went up towards 90 with the highest being 92 degrees Celsius. I began to notice strange things with my Pc on two occasions:

1) While playing Saints Row IV, my display went black and my PC's sound/audio froze/got very distorted. I hard-booted and updated the gpu driver. No problems after that.
2) While playing Battlefield: Hardline, my display crashed again (after ironically almost getting eaten by the alligator scene). When I turned the PC back on after another hard reboot, my Desktop display froze; then the PC went off completely as if I pressed and held the power button too long.

#2's symptoms continued to happen for about a week until I finally couldn't even boot past the login screen. I had no choice but to seek "professional help". Cost me a good chunk of money. They claimed it was the GPU that was causing it. Had to get another geforce gtx 760 Ti from DELL because of some adapter inside the PC that can't fit anything else (or so they claim).

I should also add that during that year-and-a-half span, I never opened up the PC and dusted it. Could that have been the reason? Didn't appear very dusty to me.

Here's the specs:

Intel i7 4770 3.4GHz processor
Geforce GTX 760 Ti OEM gpu
300-400 watt PSU
Small-Form factor case
mini-ATX motherboard
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit OS
(supplying what I believe to be sufficient for help)

I now have a working gpu and temps seem normal and display is improved. As you have read, I'd like to avoid having to go through with this in the future so I ask the community, what are some key steps I can take to prolong my gpu card? I have stopped playing 6-8 hours and have gone down to maximum 4 hours in one go. I currently have my PC go into Sleep mode after about 10 minutes and turn the display off after 5. I also have my power plan set to Balanced when it used to be High Performance. Taking the cover off the PC is an issue and something I'd rather not do. Placing fans next to PC is an option.

My final concern is how to upgrade Nvidia drivers the correct way as I believe I screwed up something and that's what caused all this. I usually select Clean Install and do it that way, but instead of my Display blacking out and then coming back, my Pc would just shut down and would continue the upgrade only after I rebooted.

A lot of questions to ask, I know, but I'm a very concerned person and why my g-card failed/why this happened in the first place continues to haunt me.

Thank you for your responses and taking the time to read my post in detail.

 

[bootcher]

GPU temperatures in the 90's are a bit high but still within the max temperatures of the 760Ti specifications according to Nvidia:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-760/specifications

Any pc component though that is under heavy load every day for 6-8 hours is bound to fail sooner than to be expected, though 1,5 years is very soon even for high usage as you described. But not impossible, many cards fail even within the warranty, it is all part of the silicon lottery in which you partake the moment you buy a pc.

So I wouldn't say it could not have been prevented but it is hard to find an explanation from what you described. Alienware used to be good quality but since DELL took over the brand it became cheaper and of less quality than before. Not dusting the PC certainly doesn't help but unless your house has a lot of dust this also need not be a problem. Also heat is not good on the long run but if the PC gets too hot it will either throttle down or shut down to prevent damage. Drivers certainly can't cause much trouble for the hardware part of the PC, it can only cause performance/stability problems.

 

[C0deM0nkey05]

GPU temperatures in the 90's are a bit high but still within the max temperatures of the 760Ti specifications according to Nvidia:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-760/specifications

Any pc component though that is under heavy load every day for 6-8 hours is bound to fail sooner than to be expected, though 1,5 years is very soon even for high usage as you described. But not impossible, many cards fail even within the warranty, it is all part of the silicon lottery in which you partake the moment you buy a pc.

So I wouldn't say it could not have been prevented but it is hard to find an explanation from what you described. Alienware used to be good quality but since DELL took over the brand it became cheaper and of less quality than before. Not dusting the PC certainly doesn't help but unless your house has a lot of dust this also need not be a problem. Also heat is not good on the long run but if the PC gets too hot it will either throttle down or shut down to prevent damage. Drivers certainly can't cause much trouble for the hardware part of the PC, it can only cause performance/stability problems.

Thank you for replying.

I've cut down the hours just as a precaution. Only had the 1-year warranty so I screwed myself after that year was up and the card (possibly) failed. "Silicon lottery"? Never heard that term before. My house isn't particularly dusty, but it is a small room and dust builds up quickly. My PC overall doesn't get that hot. It just seems to be the g-card which produces the most heat. When I put my hand against the case where the gpu is, it's very hot, but everywhere else it's not as hot. The highest temps come from the gpu; the CPU only reaches 61 degrees Celsius (highest recorded temp I've seen through Speccy). Perhaps I should invest in a bigger case for my next build? It's a "fallback plan" if the same thing happens again. Paid a ridiculous amount for one card.

The reason I bring up the drivers is because the symptoms described in Occassion #2 started happening after an update to 315 series driver I believe. After that, I rolled it back to an older version, then updated to a newer version...it was a mess. I probably did more harm than I thought.