I’m a bit suspicious about the current state of my nvidia 8600GT video card. About a year ago, I was a bit concerned that it might have been overheating, leading to graphics corruption and crashes. I picked up a couple of tools to monitor the GPU temperature, and found that when it was under heavy loads, the temperature would get quite high – or at least what I felt was quite high – climbing into the low 80s.

That’s 80 degrees Celsius, just 20 degrees short of the temperature where water boils. I got a tweaking tool and ramped the fan profile up a bit, which kept the temperature peaking in the mid 70s, and all seemed to be well.

Yesterday, though, I discovered something odd.

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