Can multi-boxing on one pc fry your graphics card?

[zanthor]

But what bout the time you said "You know what, screw it, it's nice let's roll the windows down." then you go cruising like you normally do and it rains, shorts your system right out when water gets on it.

Thus proving my point, driving didn't fuck up your stereo, getting it wet did.

Either way I'm bitching about semantics, it just offended me that day, not sure why .

[Phyzik]

I have a 8600 GT and 2g of RAM, a box fan on the side of my case, and a rear fan. Regularly dusted. I also have a Zalman fan on top of the card. After dualboxing on low settings for about a day, I started seeing early signs of artifacts. I immediately stopped and haven't gone back since.

From what I'm understanding in this post, I need more cooling on top of the large rear fan and the box fan? And if I have already seen slight artifacts, am I out of luck with this card for any future dual boxing?

[-silencer-]

Wait a damn second here...

To all those who said yes it can...

BULLSHIT.

Driving a car on the freeway can cause your car stereo to fail.

The fact is that ANY video card under a big load can get thermal damage and fail. Multiboxing puts a big load on your system, but if you keep your system maintained, clean and FUNCTIONAL fans, clean airflow, dry conditions, etc, and the system isn't flawed by design (shitty heatsync, etc) then multiboxing wont break shit.

I agree with you. The act of multiboxing won't "break" a graphics card any more than another single heavy graphics-intensive game will. If someone is having problems, it's because either their ambient (room) temperature around the case is too high or the airflow through the case isn't enough. Properly cooled graphics cards are built to withstand thousands of hours running at full load. If a card is acting up, there's a chance it's defective, but I'd bet the ambient or case cooling isn't good enough.

[magwo]

Yep.
GPUs aren't comparable to cars. GPUs are usually run at full speed when active. When you multibox, that "full speed" is divided into n slices, where n is the number of WoW instances you run.
Cars wear down if you run them at full speed for prolonged periods of time. GPUs and in general electronics, don't. They are designed to run at "full speed"/load.

[Kinc]

Multoboxing will not fry your graphic card. However since multiboxers run WoW in window-mode some graphic card + driver may result in that the fan dont responde as it should. In other words the fan might stay at 25% speed while it needs to run 60% to keep the card coold enough to remain within the specs. However this is very rare. If you experience very low fps in window-mode, check the temp of your card.

[pengwynman]

Multoboxing will not fry your graphic card. However since multiboxers run WoW in window-mode some graphic card + driver may result in that the fan dont responde as it should. In other words the fan might stay at 25% speed while it needs to run 60% to keep the card coold enough to remain within the specs. However this is very rare. If you experience very low fps in window-mode, check the temp of your card.

pretty sure fan speed depends on actual temp of the card, not load %...

as far as the car stereo example... no, your stereo (probably) isn't going to die from normal driving. yes you can damage it from driving in the rain, but that would be the equivalent of dumping water in your computer (not water cooling... >.>), not really relevant. HOWEVER, if you hook up 5 full stereo systems to one battery/alternator, chances are you're gonna have some issues.

video artifacts in my experience come from heat issues more often than not. i know the 8800 series runs VERY hot (my old card is an 8800 gtx OC2, gets too hot to touch after only a few minutes of pushing it). newer cards like the the geforce 200 series use a 65nm processing technology, which allows them to run cooler/more efficiently than the 90nm 8800's.

to sum it up: stressing any part of your system can fry it. ample cooling makes this much less likely.

[Kinc]

Multoboxing will not fry your graphic card. However since multiboxers run WoW in window-mode some graphic card + driver may result in that the fan dont responde as it should. In other words the fan might stay at 25% speed while it needs to run 60% to keep the card coold enough to remain within the specs. However this is very rare. If you experience very low fps in window-mode, check the temp of your card.

pretty sure fan speed depends on actual temp of the card, not load %...

The % Im talking about is fan speed. 100% = 12V and full speed. Some graphic cards like the Asus 9800GT Matrix or 4850 Matrix actually adjust fan speed, gpu clock freq. and gpu voltage dependent on the load on the gpu. This is done by a extra IC-processor that meassures current drawn from the power circuit which is directly linear to gpu load.

[pengwynman]

Multoboxing will not fry your graphic card. However since multiboxers run WoW in window-mode some graphic card + driver may result in that the fan dont responde as it should. In other words the fan might stay at 25% speed while it needs to run 60% to keep the card coold enough to remain within the specs. However this is very rare. If you experience very low fps in window-mode, check the temp of your card.

pretty sure fan speed depends on actual temp of the card, not load %...

The % Im talking about is fan speed. 100% = 12V and full speed. Some graphic cards like the Asus 9800GT Matrix or 4850 Matrix actually adjust fan speed, gpu clock freq. and gpu voltage dependent on the load on the gpu. This is done by a extra IC-processor that meassures current drawn from the power circuit which is directly linear to gpu load.

oic what yer sayin, lol it was like 3am when i posted, forgive me