*me, pacing back and forth in the waiting room of Computer Hardware ER*
*The doctor shows up with a grim look on his face, then stares at me*
Me: Doctor.. how’s my graphics card? Is she.. thermal throttling?
Doctor: *sighs deeply* Benie, maybe you should sit down.
Me: *getting scared, feeling sick as I sit down*
Doctor: Well, we– *turns into a random ad about Raid: Shadow Legends*
Me: ..WTF!!
When I woke up, I was strongly thinking of just going on with the ‘dedust’ plan first. But first I needed to know if it’s even possible to open up the blasted front panel (where the three intake fans are), so I can clean off the dust on the other side of the tempered glass window.
Checking my phone.. I see no videos about doing this (of this particular case). There was plenty of videos of opening up the front panel.. but for other Thermaltake models. And the only videos for this case are useless unboxing/review videos. *facepalm*
Since it seems my decision ‘has been made for me’, I went back to the original ‘stress
test’ plan: run Planet Crafter on Ultra graphics settings, for 10 minutes and watch the temps in CPUID HWMonitor. But what is this? A graphics setting beyond Ultra? ‘Maximum‘? This should be good for a stress test.
*takes deep breath* God, have mercy on my soul for the sin I’m about to commit on my graphics card. 😂
Set a timer for 10 minutes, reset HWMonitor’s values, and loaded my save. I watched the temps almost immediately jump to 70c and climbed fairly quickly to 80c. As it
approached 85c I then started noticing the core clock going down. Finally the temp stopped around 87-88c. Looked at the clock and notice it was going
between 1298 to 1355 MHz. Is this a sign of thermal throttling? Sure looked like it to me. But when I gave the results to Jero, he said “this is normal for the clock to be bouncing up and down”. He said to use MSI Afterburner instead of HWMonitor, and use a program called ‘FurMark’ for stress testing. I actually remember using this in the past.
So I got the program up and see the UI.
What should I be using…? I assumed ‘Preset: 1080 (FHD)’. Even though this is for more for benchmarking, it would still work as a stress test. Got this next.
Hit the big ‘GO!’ button and watched everything soar into the sky. And after a minute, here are the results.
Jero told me to monitor the core clock. If that line drops drastically, then it’s thermal throttling. And as you can see…
it’s not! My graphics card is stable and NOT overheating. This. is. awesome. 😁 I don’t have to worry about it anymore. And this will silence the naysayers.
Seeing this proves to me, that as long as it stays below 90c (the maximum safe temp), I’m fine. If it goes above 90c, I’ll likely see thermal throttling. This will work as a thermal threshold for me. Just need to keep my eye on it when I’m in games.