Navid wrote:

This is a good VGA cooler.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...186-110&depa=0

Thanks for that -- I'm in the UK but the site that Laurence Wilmer mentioned
has this product too so I'll have a look on there.

What are your CPU and case temperatures? Do you have MBM5 installed?

I can't tell you offhand but I'll check tonight.

What is your operating system? How much RAM have you got?

Win XP Pro with 512MB DDR400 RAM.

I am not very experienced. I have heard VGA heat resulting in
artifacts and/or freezes and crashes. But, not decreased fps!

I know, I was thinking along these lines too but don't know what else it
could be. If everything went back to normal after a reboot I'd assume it to
be a software problem (not that it ever slowed down on my previous card, an
nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200) but the continued slow performance has made me think
that heat is the likely cause.

I wondered if the heat was causing the card to throttle its performance or
to simply stop working properly. If it's not the heat than I can only
imagine it's a faulty card. I'll experiment with the case open tonight,
anyway.

I don't know anything about AMDs. Does your cpu provide throttling
when too hot, like Pentium 4s?

I believe all the motherboard does it sound an alarm if it gets too hot, not
aware of anything else. I've left the alarm temperature threshhold settings
at their default values and it's never made a sound so far.

Thanks once again for all the helpful links.

--

Adam.