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There are plenty of questions about what a safe gpu temperature is, but these seem focused on what temperatures a gpu will survive at in the short term, regardless of whether it may shorten the cards life.
I recently ordered a video card that I need to be able to run under constant strain at work, but its longevity is very important. I would not have intentionally overclocked it, but to my surprise, it was the "overclocked" edition (Sapphire Radeon HD 5770) that arrived in the mail (doh!).
What temperature should I try to keep a GPU to, if I not only want it to survive today, but want it to live a long healthy life?
P.S. We will probably be buying other cards, and any other longevity suggestions are welcome, but my actual question is specifically about temperature.
3The unfortunate truth is that we don't know. For such information extensive statistics need to be made over long (also what is long? A year, two, five ten?) period of time using representative number of video cards working in various conditions. The lifetime of an average card is just too short for that. For example, the faults in nVidia GeForce 8000 series were unknown for some time after the cards appeared. Also there's the temperature change which can affect the situation. A common problem are solder joints cracking. That could be fixed by keeping card temperature constant. – AndrejaKo – 2011-06-08T18:44:03.967
1The temperature itself in that example is less relevant, because the heating/cooling cycles are the ones doing the damage. – AndrejaKo – 2011-06-08T18:45:08.583
I agree with AndrejaKo -its a similar situation to servers in a data center. Its best to keep them at a constant temperature. As for what that temperature is? As low as possible ;-) – leinad13 – 2011-07-14T16:24:59.957