Nvidia's GeForce 9800GX2 Overheats, Crashes System

Yesterday, Nvidia unveiled its most powerful graphics card offering, the dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2. After a series of delays initially caused by some overheating issues, the card finally arrived on the market, yet it seems that the heat issue has hardly been fixed.

Recent reports emerging from the card's testers claim that the graphics card is still going way beyond its thermal envelope, and excessive heat might lead to a number of crashes, hard locks or system becoming unstable when used in conjunction with Asus' Striker II Extreme motherboard, as reported by Bit Tech.

However, it seems that the erratic system behavior is not entirely the graphic card's fault, and the nForce 200 PCI-Express bridge chip is also insanely heating up. The unfortunate placement of the nForce 200 chip between the top two PCI-Express x16 slots makes things even worse, because it's located underneath the graphics card, that spreads its own residual heat around the nForce 200 chip.

The chip manufacturer did not impose motherboard designers any limitations in placing the nForce 200 controller chip on the motherboard's PCB, because nobody would have expected the card to run so hot. The controller chip itself can reach dangerous temperatures (about 90 degrees Celsius). The graphics cores have a built-in security system that starts throttling down the graphics cores as soon as the chips' temperature reaches 105 degrees Celsius.

Anyway, the first tests unveiled the fact that the GPUs are running at a constant temperature of 85 degrees Celsius, which is not too close to the throttling down point. However, we don't know yet how the GeForce 9800 GX2 units will behave in Three- and Quad-SLI links, which are alleged to deliver insane graphics computing power, but will also spit larger amounts of residual heat than a single dual-chip card.

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