silencesummer

Ok so I have a ATI x1950Pro Iceq by HIS in Crossfire mode. I was constantly getting the "driver has stopped working and recovered" message after exiting games, and during games when the driver would crash the screen would go blank for about 5 seconds. I had tried several different versions of the driver, which I also thought was a little odd because so many had said that the ATI vista drivers were a lot better than the nvidia drivers. I have other PC's with vista, one with ati and one with nvidia, never recieved the message, but then never tried the same games (Crysis, Medal of Honor 4).Then I saw someone post a link where MS said it was usually the hardware at fault, not the driver. Thought it was the usually scapegoat tactic, and my diagnostics said temps and everything were fine for the card(average 55c, topped at 65c). However, I decided to open up my case, and use an old archaic method of touch to see how hot it was. Not only were my cards understandable hot, but my MB and the overall graphics cards were extremely hot! Under RivaTuner the 'ambient temp' was equal with the core temp (65c), and that was right were it would always start to crash! I had several fans already so I never really thought it'd be heat, but the moral of the story is now, 3 additional fans later, one installed directly on the graphcis cards, everything is working just fine, so make sure it's not radiant heat spreading to the rest of the components, or even different parts on the same component; the GPU may be made to handle high temps, but the rest of the components aren't, and with 2 big freaking cards, there's a lot of heat to go around.