Graphics Card Overheating

Just to mention first, I am not overclocking my video card.

I've been having an issue in the past few weeks with my video card overheating. At first it was overheating whenever I run any game for an hour or more. These games are not beyond my computer's capabilities because I have been able to run them with no problems in the past for many hours at a time. I narrowed it down to the most recent driver being screwy, so I rolled back.

Now, while it doesn't overheat if I'm playing, it WILL overheat if I'm idled on the main/title screen, while I'm away. No matter what game it is, or however low the graphics are set or are natively, my card will shoot up in temperature after only a few minutes of idling on the title screens.

Example: I was playing Empire: Total War for about an hour and a half, with my card topping out at about 65-70 C. When I left for half an hour, I exited back to the title screen, which is not at all graphic intensive. I come back and the temperature is reading 105 C.

I'd like to know how to solve this issue, since it's only become an issue recently (RIGHT after the warranty ended....). I just find it weird that I can play something graphic intensive just fine, but I can't idle on a low graphics screen.

I'm using a nVidia Geforce 9500 GT 512 MB 128-bit for reference and I'm checking the temperatures with SpeedFan. If you need to know anything else about my computer, let me know.

Assuming it has a fan on it, have you pulled the card out to make sure it isn't clogged with dust?

I also use RivaTuner and use that to manually bump up the fan speeds by having custom profiles for each card.

It does have a fan and I cleaned out the fan already with no change. Does bumping up the fan speed cause any bad effects? Also, why would it overhea while idling?

Britton30 said:

If you recently updated your driver to the 275.xx, that will do it.

Well it was causing issues but the version it is now dates back to last year since I rolled it back.

As an update, I've cleaned up the fan (again), made sure everything was firmly secured, got the recommended driver (270. something, I think, I forget exactly). The driver cools down faster now, but only when not in use. For example, I can exit a game when it's running at, say, 90 C, and it'll drop to 60 C within 5 minutes. However, it's still overheating while idling, reaching 105+ C and then shutting down my computer.