Worried about my GTX 970 acx 2.0

Hardware & System
#1

Bought it during Christmas sales last year so it’s only a month or so old.

One day I was playing the KC:Deliverance ALPHA and wanted to play something else, so I closed KC:Deliverance and started playing ARK Survival Evolved which is also in ALPHA stage or ‘‘Early Access’’ as they call it.

After a few hours, I noticed my room becoming very hot, I thought it was the air coming through the vents in my home but later realized it was my computer producing extreme amounts of heat, or more specifically my graphics card.

I have never seen my graphics card produce such dangerous levels of heat before. So I stopped gaming and started looking through my computer and how my system resources were being used and discovered that KC:Deliverance was still running despite me closing the program. So essentially my computer was running both KC:Deliverance and ARK Survival Evolved at the same time, 2 un-optimized programs, putting an extreme load on my graphics card to the point where I started smelling burning plastic.

Surprisingly my graphics card seems ok, I have no idea how it is still working after that extreme amount of heat it was producing but now when I play games, it gives off a faint oder of plastic. I hope that it does not artifact later.

My Specifications:
i5 2500k Quad Core Processor 3.30ghz
Windows 10 64 bit
8GB RAM
GTX 970 4GB ACX 2.0
550W PSU Gold Certified

#2

Had a very similar experience…

Was mucking around on the alpha, on a relatively warm afternoon, pc temp reading was showing around 40 degrees C and I could feel the heat literally emanating off the box below the desk… I’ve got hydro cooling on the CPU, and a number of fans, so I wasn’t too worried at this point.

Until of course I caught wind of the whole burning plastic / electrical fire type smell. It actually permeated the whole front of the house. To the point where I had people running into the study thinking something was on fire :fire:

Anyways, so I shut the everything down real quick, opened up the case and to my relief it all looked fine. No obvious burning or melting of components, let alone any direct burning smell coming off the card etc.

Had me worried though… and the smell sure did hang around for a while :smile:

Being unoptimised, it certainly can (given environmental conditions) put a fair bit of strain on your hardware. Motto of the story; aircon.

#3

These are two distinct issues. One, your cards lack of heat dissipation, and two, the game’s inability to close. The second is quite easily fixed, use Task Manager to close it. The first is a little more complicated, but it is unlikely that having the game running in the background will affect your graphics card. Memory and CPU perhaps, but running in the background will not have any impact on your GPU.

Any modern game will stress the GPU. If your case has inadequate ventilation, then it will overheat. That’s where your problem is. You can either use more exhaust fans, consider underclocking, or go with a better cooling solution like liquid cooling. Your setup should be able to run at 100% without overheating. If it can’t, then you either need to improve your cooling and airflow, or reduce the load on the GPU by lowering the clock speed. If your card is generating more frames than your refresh rate can handle, then it’s also worth using V-sync, to save power and stress on the GPU, as well as eliminate screen tearing.

#4

Oh cooling isn’t a problem, I have tons of fans on my NZXT phantom case. I’ve played many games with it and none has made it produce any significant heat with the exception of Assassins Creed Syndicate and Witcher 3. The heat was far beyond the heat those games would produce, it was abnormal.

I have edited the first post with my computer specifications.

#5

Have you thought about exchange your graphics card ? You should still have warranty or am i wrong?
I would be afraid to grill my computer.

#6

Even if you run an artificial stress test, which is far and away above the load you’d experience in the average game, you should still be able to run your CPU and GPU at 100% without them catching fire. If you can’t, then your cooling is inadequate.

It’s unclear whether or not inadequately cooling your card and melting it would be covered by the warranty or not, but definitely worth checking out. The sooner the better, especially if it still smells of burned plastic.

#7

The GTX 970 throttles at 98 °C which is a temperature that shouldn’t be a problem for plastic at all.

What I think could be the case here:

*A driver issue / the missing optimisation made the card running just below 98 °C the whole time (would explain the unusual heat) and the measurement of the heat didn’t work correctly

*Your fan curve is not designed for high temperatures

*A cable touched the graphics card which made the sleeving melt (it’s usually very thin and dainty)

*Some interferences with the drivers made the temperature measurements inaccurate which made the GPU run at something way above the throttling temperature

*Your motherboard is broken

*Your bios is buggy

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications

1 Like
#8

Thanks for the tip about the KC alpha process not ending upon game exit. I will definitely check on that the next time I boot up the alpha.

I have two 970s in SLI ( even overclocked a bit with MSI Afterburner) and haven’t had any issues with a burning plastic smell. The card should auto-throttle itself, so I’d say check on the fans on the graphics card and in your case to make sure that they aren’t hitting anything or have wires rubbing against them that would cause friction.

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