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Games freezing up - overheating card??

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humdinger

Member
Joined
Dec 17, 2002
Help! I recently upgraded my pump to an Eheim 1250 and removed a reservoir/pump I used before. Now it seems games which used to work before freeze after a short while and I can't even Alt-TAB out!

My setup:

Eheim 1250->Dtek Heatercore->DD Maze 2->DD Geforce 3->back to pump

The DD Maze 2 is on a P4 2.8Ghz and the GF block is on a Radeon 9700 (old GF3 block not the new Acrylic top one)

My water temp out of the 'core is under 30°C idle and my P4 idles around 29 to 33°C. Everything seems to be fine and stable when not running any 3D games.

When playing games the CPU temp goes up to 43°C or so (not sure when it peaks because things freeze by then!) and water temp goes up to early 30s.

I've a Gigabyte Maya 2 Radeon 9700 and no way to know what the temperature of the GPU might be! :mad:

Any suggestions?? Not sure if it's something with the waterkit or maybe system but I'm hoping it's just the latter :(
 
I may be wrong but if i remember correctly the radeon 9700 gpu heatsink used a large thick thermal pad~epoxy on the core right? Make sure that the waterblock is sitting flush against the middle of the core rather than just touching the high edges of the core. I have heard you just have to lap it down abit but as i havnt done that myself probably just a good thing to take a really close look at first off. Hope this helps and if you have any question just post or PM me if you want.
 
I myself have a Radeon 9700pro water cooled, and when I was first installing my water block, I noticed that the block actually deos not make contact with the GPU due to the shim that ATI has put around the chip. You should put a thin layer of thermal past on the gpu and place your water block ontop of the chip, press it firmly and then take it off and see if any was transfered to the block. In my case, there was not any transfered. I had to carefully remove the shim from the card, but most people do not feel comfortable doing that so I've heard of people just putting a larger amount of past to fill the gap, or using a copper spacer, ect. But thats something you might want to check.
 
Well, I had a look and it probably is the shim/core. Reseated the waterblock with a thicker layer of paste and it seems to work fine now. Might see about removing the shim or using a copper spacer as I'm not sure if it's a good idea just to rely on a thicker layer of paste! Thanks for the tips! :)
 
I have read that having a water resevoir is better. Since the system has more water on it it can hold more heat (heat capacity). Also the water sitting on the resevoir, even for a short amount of time will cool a bit. Lastly, are you using the same water coming off the cpu to cool the 9700 pro? If so, I would recommend a Y fitting so that the video card also gets cold water specially if you have a radeon 9700 pro, that sucker gets really hot.
 
I had same behaviour of my 9700 pro (air cooled, but this is relavent): it would lock up when I started gaming. Apparently you have to keep the fan pluged into a power source for it to run and cool the chip :eek: .

I removed the shim from my 9700pro. The heatsink seems plenty far above the resistors. I don't know if the shim served some sort of secondary cooling though. I feel much better about the contact on the GPU now.
To remove it i slipped a razor just slightly under one corner, then put some paper in, then pried my way around with a jeweler's screwdriver on top of the paper, and inserting paper as I went around until it popped off about 3/5 of the way.

You can get poorly distributed flow to different blocks when using a Y. Especially if you have a CPU block with a jet, the water's gonna take the easiest route, the lazy crap.
 
I have everything in series yes - CPU block then feeds into the VGA block which then goes into the pump, which then goes into the radiator.

From the posts I've read it seems to be a better idea to keep the blocks in series, but put radiators in parrallel? My worry about having the blocks in parrallel would be as mentioned by PatrickBateman - the water takes the quickest route so perhaps there isn't an even split between the CPU block and the VGA block? Can anyone elaborate on this idea?

The other idea I'm thinking is to use a 2nd radiator. One for the CPU block and one for the VGA?

Shim removal doesn't sound too painful so I might try that! :)
 
When you put a waterblock on the gpu with the shim removed, how do you know how much pressure you are using? How much pressure is needed?
 
Anyone?

It seems most other WBs come with specific mounting instructions that tell the user how to mount with the necessary pressure without cracking the core.

For all those that WC their gpu, how did you mount your WB?
 
It seems most other WBs come with specific mounting instructions that tell the user how to mount with the necessary pressure without cracking the core.

Wangster... My 9700 block from DD came with no instructions at all about the shim. In a email with DD, they said that some cards the shim had to be removed others not. My card needed the shim removed, removing the shim isn't bad as long as your careful. Your right it would be nice to something tell you around how tight it has to be.

It installed Ok, I made it pretty tight, not bend the card tight, but tight.

I hope this helps.
fdoggiedog woof woof

edited for spelling
 
Last edited:
Thanks fdoggiedog,

That's what I thought about the pressure but I just wanted to know some other people's opinions.

My main concern is the consistency of shim thickness for GPU WBs that have indentations to allow for proper clearance. What if a particular card has slightly higher/uneven/etc.. shims?

Just thoughts,

Wangster
 
has anyone considered that it might be the cpu getting too hot? are you overclocked? if so then it might be getting unstable with the rise of temperature and the system is just freezing up.

if it were the card i would expect that you could still do other operations but your monitor just couldnt display it, so if you ran a burn-in program (prime95, toast) to get the temp up instead of a game, when the screen freezes up, use the windows+R to bring up the run dialog box. type in the path to your favorite mp3, hit enter, and see if you hear it playing... this will tell you if your system is froze up or just your video card.

before you start the burnin program you can type the path to the mp3 and "copy" it, so that when you bring up the run dialog with the screen frozen you dont have to worry about typing it right and you can just press control+v to "paste" it.

Does anyone know if you can still perform other system operations when your vid card freezes? If so, then this will be a fine way of telling if it is the cpu overheating or the gpu. You can give it a shot anyways and just see if that works, but it will draw a better conclusion if someone else confirms that it is possible to run another system operation while your vid card is frozen.

good luck. :)
 
Humdinger,

Sorry to jack your thread.

As to your original question. Have you tried setting your cpu to stock just so you can eliminate the variables?

That way you could determine whether it was your video card or your cpu.

Just a thought,

Wangster
 
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