HOT! 9700 pro.....literally

My 9700 pro card is very hot to the touch. Is this normal? Theres a small metal plate on the back of the card, and when i touched it, i burnt my finger it was so hot!

Just need to know its not gonna fry!

LOL! This one actually made my day! Do you make a habit of going around and touching little black chips in your computer? What you touched was actually the back of your GPU ( Graphic Processing Unit ) In simplistic terms it's the cpu of your video card. That big fan on the front is cooling the front side of the GPU but normally without ramsinks or better cooling on the front the GPU will heat up from anywhere to 30 - 50 degrees in use especially if you have been overclocking it.

I think I strayed a little from your question though. No your card is not going to fry, it is perfectly normal for it to be hot to the touch. You only have to worry once you start pushing temperatures above 50 degrees celcius. But again I think you should know what you're doing before you go around poking at things inside your case

Actually its not a black chip

If you look at the pic on this page:

http://www.explosivelabs.com/reviews/ati_radeon9700-128mb/card_back.jpg

I was refering to that plate in the top right of the card.

Godzilla said:

My 9700 pro card is very hot to the touch. Is this normal? Theres a small metal plate on the back of the card, and when i touched it, i burnt my finger it was so hot!

Just need to know its not gonna fry!

Click to expand...

He mentioned small metal plate buddy, that is pink heatspreader, cooling voltage regulators.
What are your case temps and how hot are your memory chips ???
Mine were quite hot so I installed a few homemade ramsinks and things are better now ( 20 Mhz increase in o/c too )

Misread the post, I just assumed that he was touching the GPU That's actually the first 9700 PRO with that on it I have seen.

How do i test the temperature of the chips?? They are quite hot if u touch them though

Well are they hot after playing for some time or just being in windows ?
If they are hot so you can't hold your finger on them that is dangerous
Well you could add some heatsinks to them with Arctic Silver III and some super glue on corners ( That's what I did ). And I found that my heatsink wasn't touching the core due to shim so I removed it and put there a new heatsink ( not sure about the brand but it is biiiiig ) Strangely that reduced temps on my RAM chips too !

Have you o/c your card or anything ? And could you post what rating chips have ? 2.8ns or something else...

Hope this helps!

My card also runs very hot, it's just normal for them. I love my 9700 pro, but damn they did a **** por job at cooling it. I just removed the shim today and i'll be ordering ramsinks and a new gpu cooler tomorrow morning

Ya i just got mine and it runs very very hot, ut im thinking its normal, im going to go crazy cooling it, im prolly going to end up watercooling to gu, and perhaps even the ram. That metal plate you were talking about burnt me also, i think it may be normal ;-\