MrSegfault wrote on 2025-07-10, 16:06:
Does anyone know if it's normal or not for a 7900 GT to reach 60 degrees temperature on idle? I'm having this happening to me even after renewing the thermal compound.
Is it a reference design with the reference cooler? If yes, I'd say this is about "normal"... well, maybe a bit on the high side, but I can definitely see it if your case is not well ventilated and if your room temperatures are higher this time of the year (summer.) Add dust from use, and that would do it.
In reality with these bumpgate era cards, you should keep it at 55C or less at full load if you want it to last at all.
To do that, step 1 would be to just get rid of that stock cooler and install something much bigger - dual slot preferred. Or maybe one of the large passive coolers and put a fan on it. Otherwise with the stock cooler, you can expect your full load temperatures to easily reach 75-80C, regardless of what kind of thermal paste you use or how much case cooling you add.
In plain words, the stock reference cooler really is shit on the 7900 GT and GS cards.
The 7950 GT does it a little better and has a slightly bigger cooler.... but it's still shit (I have one of these cards too.)
Now the 7900 GTX dual-slot cooler is what should have been installed on these cards. Supposedly the G71 core is around 90W max TDP on the 7900 GTX cards, so you can expect a little lower on the GT and GS models (perhaps in the 65-70W range for the 7950 GT/O, and 60-ish for the GT/GS.) With such TDP, only the dual slot reference cooler from the GTX is adequate. All the others are cheapskate stuff better suited for something like a GeForce 6200/7300/7600 GT at best.
DrLucienSanchez wrote on 2025-07-11, 16:09:
Are any of you using a 7 series card or G71 based quadro able to control the cards fan via software?
I'm using a Quadro FX 1500 with the 82.69 drivers in 98SE but unable to control the cooler fan via Riva Tuner, so it's running at 100% fan all the time, not ideal, fine in XP though. It allows me to chaange the fan percantage, save, but does not apply the setting.
If you can't change the fan in WinXP, then it's possible your card may not even have the necessary electrical components for fan control. FWIW, I have a Gigabyte 7900 GT that came stock with a Zalman VF-700 cooler, and the components (inductor, 2 transistors, and several resistors and caps) are missing from the PCB, so I can't control its fan.
That said, check your card. If you don't see a small SMD inductor near the fan connector and if your fan is a 2-wire fan, then your card might have the fan control circuit not installed / bypassed. Though from what I can see from pictures of a stock nVidia reference Quadro FX 1500, there is a small inductor near the fan connector, so that card should have fan control.
Perhaps try MSI Afterburner (under XP) and also try different driver versions, in case the ones you're running with have something that prevents fan control. With MSI Afterbuern, you should even be able to set a custom fan curve. I do that to a lot of my XP cards, since the stock fan profile on most cards (both nVidia and ATI/AMD) tend to wait waaayy to long and cook the card before ramping up the fan... resulting in a dead card down the road.
And just to note here... the reference QFX 1500 appears to use the same design as the reference 7900 GS cards. I have a few if the latter - namely two dead ones (BFG and nVidia stock one) and a working one (PNY). On my PNY 7900 GS, I can control the fan via MSI Afterburner and Riva Tuner... though, that's pretty useless, as even the fan running full tilt @ 100%, I can't keep the GPU cool enough to prevent the card from going near the bumpgate danger zone temperatures. So I've ripped the stock cooler on that one and added an Xbox 360 CPU heatsink for the time being. It's a bit... bulky. 🤣 But it works pretty well with an 80 mm fan.
Well, an ugly working card is better than a "nice looking" dead one. I have too many wall pieces as it is already, so I'm trying to keep my working card working for as long as possible.
