How long will my video card last...

...without a fan? and will it tell me before it dies? I noticed that the GPU fan was the loudest thing in the studio, and the temp was reasonable, and I don't do any gaming. So I took the fan out. It seems happy enough at the moment, but it is slowly heating up. I can't find any utilities that will tell me gpu temp (I've got an Asus eax1050/TD), I've tried speedfan and rivatuner with no success. Any ideas? I'm happy to fit a monster heatsink and large/slow fan if needed, but it would be nice not to have to. After that there's the noisy hard drive. then the cpu fan. By then my baby will be born and I'll wonder why I ever worried about a gpu fan.

I'd think about putting a potentiometer inline, to slow down the fan, instead of taking it out all together. Vid cards aren't nearly as cheap as a pot, or a controllable fan. Maybe put the box in a different room, or closet, and run the cables to vid/kbd/mouse through a hole in the wall. I did this once, and it worked pretty well.

Google ATI TOOL This is for ATI based cards. Rivatuner is for Nvidia. If the card gets too hot the screen will crap out and the system will go down. Removing the fan is a good way to start the "Gonna Look fer a New Card" process.

You could try "HWMonitor" too. Gpu's are more resistant to high temperatures than cpu's. When I got my passive cooled 9600gt, it could reach 100c under load. However I thought that's too much, so I installed small ultra low speed fan to the heatsink. Now it's silent and cool enough. I wouldn't recommend taking fan off from active cooled gpu, as their heat sinks are small. But it might work perfectly if you can find a way to slow down the fan so it remains silent. There are also passive cooling kits that can be installed to the most ATI/nvidia gpu's. I think it's acceptable, if your gpu stays under 60c. cheers

Its had a good day of use without any problem, but I think I'll try my hand at putting a pot inline anyway (summer may be a lot more stressful than winter). Thanks brad for the heads up on ati tool. I'll check it out soon.

I would put it back on if it were me. There are some free tools out there for controlling fan speeds on video cards. Speedfan is a good one , and EVGA precision works well too (NVIDIA cards only). Simple interface.

I've tried Ati Tool and HWMonitor, but neither of them will show the gpu temp or fan speed (now that I've put the fan back on). Maybe my graphics card simply will not share that data. (I did ask for the cheapest dual screen card they had)

If the card came with a fan on it - there's a reason for it. You may get lucky for a while but eventually it's gonna burn up. Plus the untamed ambient heat is going to effect other/nearby components as well..... Modern video cards are designed to run maximum FPS in video games or deliver HD content from BluRay discs. They are complete overkill in a DAW. Since you're not concerned with running games on your machine, just get one of these and call it a day: Big heatsink. No fan. No noise. To run a second monitor, just use an adapter to have either 2xDVI or 2xVGA outs (it has one of each output on the card). For the hard drive, any of the current ones made by Seagate or Samsung should be quiet enough (I use Seagate myself). For the CPU fan, this one's really good and quiet too: hm

I love my Arctic Cooling stuff. :)

if you don't need the 3d, why don't you just get a cheaper, passively cooled card?