I suppose this has been asked time and time again, but here goes:

July 2008, I bought a GTX 280, ran it 24x7 for 6 months on GPU GRID until it burned out.

Could'nt RTM due to geographic reasons.

Bought a 4870x2, felt happier due to its gaming stability and cheaper price performance ratio.

Now I'm happily crunching 24x7 on milky way for almost 2 weeks. AC in my room is busted, so instead of averaging 80c I'm averaging 90c on the card. Don't mind the noise.

Did you, or did anyone you know had their ATI burned? My little web research shows that nVidias have a notoriously higher failure rate than ATIs, could be bad manufacturing or could be the higher market share, which leads to higher failure counts!

You rarely hear of CPUs burning even with nasty over clocks, but GPU burning is all to common, methinks!

Usually capacitors on a card are rated to 105ºC. Though I bet they don't last too long at that temperature.

I prefer having my cards hit 80C max, preferably around 60-65C if I can help it with fans etc.

One thing I found works is to declock your memory - it has very little effect on the MW app so it should produce less heat if you declock it.

Now wierdly enough I also see a temp decrease when running slight overclocks. It's wierd, but I do. Also remember that overclocking voids your warranty though.

GFX cards are now designed to be pelted, so it should run 24x7 for the whole warranty. However I guess they assume it'll be in a regular environment. Your GTX280 sounds like a dud if it burnt out. If you can't RMA it, tried reseating it/changing the cooler?

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One thing I found works is to declock your memory - it has very little effect on the MW app so it should produce less heat if you declock it.

GFX cards are now designed to be pelted, so it should run 24x7 for the whole warranty. However I guess they assume it'll be in a regular environment. Your GTX280 sounds like a dud if it burnt out. If you can't RMA it, tried reseating it/changing the cooler?

Thanks for the tip, I've moved the slider all the way down to 500 mhz for mem on both cards, on average I've dropped 90c to 80c on the primary and from 80c to 70c on the secondary card.

GTX 280 was severely burned, I could hear little metallic clicks coming out of the chip! The card can run in 2d mode, but once it hits 3d or cuda, I'd get a screen full of rainbows!

I have a quad with an ATI HD4850 for MW.

Crunching away nicely until about 7.00pm tonight, then the PC died. I thought the 4850 had burnt out, despite the fan running at 60% and the temperature being 77c to 81c with 98% load on the GPU.

I tried rebooting the PC, but zip all. So, for the second time - either the PSU has died (last time mid October 2008, and replaced with a Gold 550w jobbie) or the MoBo (the Asus P5D lost capacitors and went away to be replaced by a Gigabyte MoBo.

If either component is at fault I should get it replaced under the 12 month warranty. But my RAC will drop like a ...

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Go away, I was asleep

I have a quad with an ATI HD4850 for MW.

Crunching away nicely until about 7.00pm tonight, then the PC died. I thought the 4850 had burnt out, despite the fan running at 60% and the temperature being 77c to 81c with 98% load on the GPU.

I tried rebooting the PC, but zip all. So, for the second time - either the PSU has died (last time mid October 2008, and replaced with a Gold 550w jobbie) or the MoBo (the Asus P5D lost capacitors and went away to be replaced by a Gigabyte MoBo.

If either component is at fault I should get it replaced under the 12 month warranty. But my RAC will drop like a ...

Please keep me posted, I have a gigabyte and an antec 850 watt.

Today I've upgraded the drivers to 9.9, and went for the .19G application!

MASSIVE temprature drops!

Temp went down from 80c to 70c at full fan throttle with mem downclocked to 500 mhz.

On auto mode the fan would throttle at 40%, but the chip never exceeds 90c.

I prefer manual full fan throttle.

Bottom line, I like the new driver update, and gipsel's .19g updated app cut down gpu computation by an average of 20 seconds, before and after the driver update!

The power transistors (VDDC as in GPU-Z etc) can survive up to 180 degrees C for an indeterminate amount of time but at least a few hours (as people who fail to install 3rd party coolers or have damaged stock coolers have discovered).

Also, the cores and DISPIO (display input / output) and MEMIO (memory input / output) and the shader core can run at temperatures of ~100 degrees C for several months without failure however system stability may be low at these temperatures. This is a problem for people who are not aware their cards are running so hot - as many 4870x2 manufactures ship(ped) these cards with bios settings that didn't control the fan speed properly).

As always with silicon based technologies, you should try to keep the temperature as low as practically possible. At a temperature over 100 degrees many silicon chips will suffer rapid structural damage due to impurities in the molecular structure of the wafer. However, the high end ATI cards are somehow manufactured to allow high temperature operation for extended periods of time. This is not particularly unique of ATI/AMD because other chips for specialized applications have been designed to run at temperatures of over 250 degrees (maybe higher, thought 250 is the highest I've heard of).

If you are running your card 24/7 you should aim to keep temps under 80 degrees C to try to increase the long-term lifespan of the card. As other people have pointed out it is a good idea to set the memory frequency to 500 (or lower if stable using 3rd party programs) as this will save power ($) and lower temps, especially of MEMIO and the VDDC's.

If your really keen you can buy a 3rd party fan/heatsink or watercooling block for the card however they're expensive (but they are usually alot cooler, quieter (or silent)).

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GTX 280 was severely burned, I could hear little metallic clicks coming out of the chip! The card can run in 2d mode, but once it hits 3d or cuda, I'd get a screen full of rainbows!

Have you taken the card out and cleaned it with compressed air ? Check for bugs falling out of the card that may have got caught in it and stopped airflow, just to see if that caused it.

See this interesting video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s727hZ_VU9Q

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Team Bletchley Park.