[Geekiness] Never again Nvidia

Rambly post ahead. Edit in the morning.

Too much geekiness gives me a headache. Or else it’s the dust I cleaned out from Kuro which made me sneeze and get a headache. 😛 Either way, today’s trip to LowYat turned out to be completely unnecessary. Sorry for dragging you guys everywhere, Mika and Ezel!

I’ve been having overheating issues with Kuro since I started playing Settlers 7. The first few times I did so, he kept crashing on me after a few hours worth of play and I couldn’t figure out the reason why. Speedfan told me a lot of things but none of them were useful till I asked Raz. Suspected it could have been an overheating board, and I learnt to recognise the signs after a few tries.

I thought it could have been the processor which was overheating as I kept reading GPU as processor in my mind. Turns out it was my NVidia card, not my Athlon processor which was the cause (on another note, I think I know now how to reapply thermal glue on the processor). I decided to swap out the card I had with my backup (which, interestingly, supports HDMI, a fact I missed earlier) and then downloaded Afterburner from MSI.

The main reason to get Afterburner was NOT to overclock my GPU, but to adjust the fan speed instead, as I suspected it was not doing its job of cooling the card properly. Turns out I was right. By default, ALL THE TIME, my Nvidia 9500 GT card was set at 40%. -_-” Ok for running just browser and chats but completely NOT ok for gaming, especially high intensity. Switched it to 80% instead and my temperatures were much more stable. I also set the speed for Speedfan now, so will monitor through the night.