According to ATi, you're safe unless you are overclocking or you have modified the cooling. They claim to have reproduced this spike in temps in their labs, and say it is nothing to worry about under stock conditions. I guess I'll just let ATi do the talking...
3.8’s causing hardware burnouts? - 7:23 pm EST - G.I.Bro
While I was reading through the forums, I noticed a few threads popping up in which are discussing thoughts that the CATALYST 3.8’s could be burning out peoples hardware. People on the forums are mentioning that the 3.8’s are overheating their video cards, along with monitors burning out! I just spoke to Terry Makedon (aka CATALYST maker) about this, and this is what he had to say:
1) Overheating. We have spent a great deal of time analyzing the temperatures due to the CATALYST 3.8 drivers. We do not under any circumstance see anything near a 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature (but we don’t overclock our test cards either). We do see a slight increase in temperature in certain cases (3Dmark2003 Nature Scene for example). However any temperature increase is well within our safety range. Investigation continues and we are trying to determine why this change in temperature exits
2) Monitors. We have spent a great deal of time trying to reproduce this problem and analyzing the driver code. There is nothing to be found. At this point we are working very closely with an ATI Beta Tester who experienced a monitor loss. There have been zero reports in our customer support of monitors dying.
Thanks goes out to Terry for taking a few moments out of his extremely busy day for us!
