Think this game fried my vid card!

JoeMacUnGee

Warlord
Joined
Jul 6, 2010
Messages
146
Granted, I was running a 7600 GS, but after a week of playing this game, kaput.

May be a coincidence, but I'm not so sure it is. have a DX11 card on the way to me today, so should be back at it! :)
 
Perhaps it overheated? Btw, gfx cards should break down because of playing a game. Perhaps it's a heat issue, or a power surge or your card was already broke and this was just waiting to happen.
 
I'd lean towards heat, that's a fairly common issue and gets worse with cards that are underpowered for what the game is throwing at them. Some people add an auxiliary fan to help airflow and improve cooling. Also dust control may be helpful.
 
I'd lean towards heat, that's a fairly common issue and gets worse with cards that are underpowered for what the game is throwing at them. Some people add an auxiliary fan to help airflow and improve cooling. Also dust control may be helpful.

Being underpowered (in the performance sense) typically isn't an issue, as any video card will run at full load, simply at different speeds depending on the speed.

The problem lies solely with insufficient cooling or deffective cards.
 
Granted, I was running a 7600 GS, but after a week of playing this game, kaput.

May be a coincidence, but I'm not so sure it is. have a DX11 card on the way to me today, so should be back at it! :)

It's a 4 year old video card, and on day one it was obsolete. It was brought out as a very budget video card, and it was not actively cooled. This means it was made as cheaply as possible, and the whole time it's run it's been hot. The components on the card will last signficiantly shorter lifespans on average than components on a card which is actively cooled, particularly the voltage regulation components.

That aside you're accusing Civ5 of doing something "wrong" that's broken your video card, and your reasoning is that although it may be a coincidence, you're not so sure it is. I cannot think of a polite response to that.
 
It's a 4 year old video card, and on day one it was obsolete. It was brought out as a very budget video card, and it was not actively cooled. This means it was made as cheaply as possible, and the whole time it's run it's been hot. The components on the card will last signficiantly shorter lifespans on average than components on a card which is actively cooled, particularly the voltage regulation components.

That aside you're accusing Civ5 of doing something "wrong" that's broken your video card, and your reasoning is that although it may be a coincidence, you're not so sure it is. I cannot think of a polite response to that.

No offense taken, but the card was actively cooled. And I'd argue that when I purchased it, it was in the upper quarter of cards on the market, and served me well for many years. But I believe that the card was over-taxed by the game, and probably on its last legs anyway.

Didn't mean to put your knickers in a knot.
 
If it was passively cooled then it wasn't reference design - it's unusual it should fail after 4 years. It was never upper quarter, but it was very bang for buck when it came out.

My knickers get in a twist when people throw out wild accusations that have potential to cause scares. I happen to know that a game can't kill a graphics card, but not everybody does and rumous about it doing so aren't good things :)
 
If it was passively cooled then it wasn't reference design - it's unusual it should fail after 4 years. It was never upper quarter, but it was very bang for buck when it came out.

My knickers get in a twist when people throw out wild accusations that have potential to cause scares. I happen to know that a game can't kill a graphics card, but not everybody does and rumous about it doing so aren't good things :)

Not my intention to cause a panic. Just making an observation. I agree on the bang for the buck categorization. That's what I do with vid cards. I don't do FPS games so I don't need to be bleeding edge. I usually buy cards that are on the upper 1/4th of tomshardware's chart, as cheaply as I can get them. ;)
 
Well I'm not sure if I am contributing much here, but I have 2 9800gt's in sli and my fan turns on once in awhile but sparingly. I only mention this because my cards aren't the latest greatest either, but they seem to handle the game fine. I have found that perhaps the biggest bottle neck for this game maybe the processor. Perhaps others more knowledgeable than myself can shed some light on this?
 
Well I'm not sure if I am contributing much here, but I have 2 9800gt's in sli and my fan turns on once in awhile but sparingly. I only mention this because my cards aren't the latest greatest either, but they seem to handle the game fine. I have found that perhaps the biggest bottle neck for this game maybe the processor. Perhaps others more knowledgeable than myself can shed some light on this?

Maybe the SLI isn't working properly? Or do you have a costum cooling solution for the 9800gts? MY GTX260 gets ~100% load under DX11 mode, and it should be roughly comparable to a dual 9800gt
 
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