I have a GeForce 4 4200Ti and I've recently started having hard lockups after about 24 hours of running (usually while running a GL screensaver or game.) I pulled the case off yesterday and found that the video card was very hot. Nothing else in the computer was out of the ordinary. I've never overclocked the card, so I was curious why I am having problems. After pulling the heat sink off the card, I found that only about 1/3 of the surface of the GPU is covered in thermal grease. Is this normal? I've always made sure to put enough to cover the entire chip, but I never thought to check my video card.

Anyway, I don't have any thermal grease laying around, so I used nvclock to underclock the GPU and RAM by 25% to 187 Mhz / 375 Mhz.. My question is, will this hold me over until I can get some thermal grease, or am I safer to just leave the computer off?

BTW, the heat sink was relatively cool, but the bottom of the card (top when installed) was hot enough I couldn't touch it without being burned.

Well that's a sign of a poorly applied heatsink if I ever saw one.
I wouldn't use the card at all (underclocked or not) until I had cleaned up the contact surfaces (hot tip - use your girlfriend's nail polish remover) and had some thermal grease applied.

Håkan

Thanks, I'll do that. However, I probably should use the wife's nail polish remover. Don't want to create any more problems...