My friend's Geforce FX had it's transistors blown

[K.I.L.E.R]

Apparently if you don't clean the fans out every 2 weeks the dust builds up and causes the fans to slow, which result in overheating.

I've never heard of this before but shouldn't a video card lock up under such circumstances instead of blow up?

Sorry but my friend doesn't know what model video card he has besides "Geforce FX"

 

[ANova]

I don't believe any GPUs have the ability to downclock or shut down when past their threshold temperature, yet.

 

[maaoouud]

I thought this was well known. I put filters in front of the air intakes that will be at floorlevel in my computers and I still have to clean them once or twice every year. If you have furry pets then you really have to consider the dust a problem or you might run into this. The cards today generate up to 120W of heat so they absolutely must be actively cooled at all times or they'll take damage. Remember those first Intel processors that melted through the motherboard ? Well they were nowhere close to this kind of heat. IIRC they were at 20-25W or so.

It also happened to my old geforce 2 mx400 which the fan got stuck on and then MELTED on top of the tiny 2.5mm heatsink on it. The card just kept going though (less fan noise) and I didn't really notice it until summer came and it got unstable.

 

[Guden Oden]

I don't believe any GPUs have the ability to downclock or shut down when past their threshold temperature, yet.

Hm, recent-ish Nvidia cards (FX series and later) will certainly alert you if they start overheating, since they have on-die temp sensors. Well, unless the card manufacturer skimped on the hardware monitoring circuitry that is... Then one is screwed, heh.