so do you think i'm fine BC? also do you think that i'm do for an upgrade or do you think that the 8800gt is still good?
Yeah I'd say so. Can't say as far as the graphics card goes, I usually defer to Calum's expertise when I can, but from what I can gather the 8800gt is pretty similar to the 9800GT (the latter of which is my card).
Now, if you're having crashing/freezing issues, that changes the whole story. In my case, originally, playing some (the more GPU intensive, crysis, for example) games for about 30-40 minutes would cause the game to crash. I repasted the card and- the temps dropped, but the problems stayed. I ran furmark, and ran it overnight at "full blast" with no problems, and got a lot of other stuff working stabley, but Crysis refused to run for more then about 40 minutes before it crashed.
I reduced a few settings from Ultra High and the problems went away. I eventually managed to isolate the "crash" to having the shadows setting on Ultra High. I turned it to high and haven't had a problem since- at least, not problems I think are related to the graphics card.
Anyway: to summarize, your temperatures look exceedingly well to me. your load temp (74~c) is lower then my idle temperature, and the 9800GT and 8800GT I believe use the same GPU, with minor alterations, and I haven't had any problems.
In further unrelated anecdotes I had a K6-2 that would often have it's "high temperature alarm" trip; strangely it always occured on the exact same level of Duke3d
.
I rebooted and checked the BIOS temp display and the CPU would sometimes register as over 100 Celsius (222f)! More recently I decided to replace the heatsink/fan on that machine as well as upgrade the processor from 350Mhz to 450Mhz and discovered the cause- the thermal pad was basically turned to a caked on layer of dust. I used some of the thermal paste I had as well as the new (less dust clogged) heatsink and CPU and it ran nice and cool. Also had my NVidia Geforce 5500FX overheat (in fact, I started a thread here on CH on that very issue back in the day, probably before I had ~100 posts); I originally "solved" the problem by underclocking the card (which was factory Overclocked) to the stock 5500FX setting. I later discovered the reason was because the fan was busted. I managed to pop out the fan component and the placed the similar component from a 6200FX I had bought but never used (in this case the 5500FX won out because it was AGP and the 6200FX was PCI).
So, yeah, there's that. before that temp was never an issue, aside from the integrated graphics chipset I accidentally fried on a Pentium machine because I thought the heatsink that was on the graphics chip was mere decoration. Turns out it wasn't.
