max safe temperature for a 6600gt?

Right now my evga 6600gt goes over 85C sometimes. Is that too hot for it to handle? What should the limit be so I won't damage my card?

There really is no set limit per se, but 85C is definitely too hot! The rule to go by is to run it as low as you can. As an example, my Chaintech on stock cooling runs at 48-49 idle and about 51-52 gaming at 400/1100. At 435/1150 temps go up a little to 49-50 idle and 53-55. that's what it was running awhile ago when i did a few runs in F1. About an hours worth of gaming. I'd definitely keep load temps down below 65C. Anymore than that and performance will suffer, and could cause damage. These GPU's are pretty tough, but heat is always a bad thing with any processor.

You might want to try and remove the HS, lap it, and reapply with AS5 or Ceramique. Either will work. Be careful with the AS5 don't let any get on the SMT resistors around the GPU. It won't hurt teh GPU in any way though, so don't worry about that.

If that doesn't work, you may want to try a better cooler. There are mnay good ones, but the best is probably a STASIS Thermal. Reply back if you want to try aftermarket cooling options, and state what kind of performance you want and how much you want to get into it. The STASIS are one of the more expensive options, but are by far the very best on the market. I do not make generalized statements like that lightly...the STASIS are THAT good.

While nVidia uses form of 'thermal throttling' in brand of GPU to stop them from being damaged by excessive heat due to overclocking (or other circumstances), nVidia's implementation of this feature tends to be a bit more sensitive than that found on ATI cards.

It's extremely rare to see artifacts or visual imperfections on a current or previous generation nVidia card. This is because the video core will manually slow itself down before a state stressful enough to cause video artifacts is reached. As readers might imagine, this feature makes determining the maximum overclock attainable by an nVidia card more frustrating than it otherwise would be.

When using the Coolbits hack to overclock an nVidia videocard, there is no indication that this throttling has been activated, so the only way to tell if you've pushed the card beyond its temperature limits is by noticing a decrease in benchmarking scores. If at x MHz the benchmark score increases as normal, but at x+5MHz it suddenly drops several hundred points, the thermal throttling has just kicked in. The frustration really sets in when trying to determine the precise point that the feature activates. Since the throttling is heat-triggered, it won't necessarily be the same value every time.

From this thread!

85C over time can't be healthy, and in some cases may cause artifacts even at stock speeds, however this is rare. The major problem with such high temps is you will find any overclocking headroom has been consumed by such a high temperature...