Smack2k wrote:

I took the stock fan / cooler off and cleaned / added new thermal paste to the chip, but once back in the PC, the card was getting REALLY hot to the touch, so I shut it down again.

touching the heatsink with your finger isn't an accurate temperature measurement stick with the sensor readings only.

you can use somthing like speedfan to manually adjust the gpu's fan speed. or just hardwire the fan to 12v , it'll be loud but it'll be cool

Just replace the stock cooler with something decent like a zalman vf900 (period correct but not common anymore) or upgrade to something modern. A lot of these cards failed even when they were new and were a bit of a rip off.

Thanks for the advice....will look for something to better cool the card.....

As for the touching of the heatsink....this was after it crashed and I opened the case to check it out.....

I would only trust touching my finger to the heatsink to confirm that is having contact because if the gpu is hot and the heatsink isnt even warm that could indicate bad heat transfer