On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:12 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm wondering if the card may be getting hot and slowing down because of > that? i replaced the heat sink a good while back and I got more than enough > cooling on the case. The heat sink has a fan and maybe it is not turning or > something. I did blow out the dust a while back and I do have filters over > the intakes to help some.
Some Nvidia cards can go into a slow-motion mode when they overheat, I had that happen on mine (it was a 6000 or 7000 series, I think) when the fan died and I didn't realize it. The slowdown was dramatic in those cases. It would usually happen if I was playing a game or a video, suddenly it would go 2 frames per second. I'd stop the game/video, and even things like opening a window were slow. After a minute or two, everything would be back to normal speed. Eventually I learned that the card was protecting itself by switching to an ultra-slow mode to try to fight the overheating. nvidia-settings may be able to show you the temperature and speeds on your card. You might need to add: Option "coolbits" "1" to the device section in your xorg.conf to get it to show you some of those options if they aren't initially visible.
