GPU gets hot whilst playing, cools down immediately when tabbing out or opening Q menu? - Help

I posted this in the hardware & software forum but I'm posting it here too in the hope of finding an answer. In the latest of a series of issues i've been having with my new PC, I've noticed that whilst playing Garry's Mod, my GPU's temperature has been gradually ramping up then immediatelly dropping down whenever I tab out or open the Q menu. I've not noticed this with any other games, just Garry's mod. I've been playing with Speedfan open just to monitor how stuff is doing, and after about 15 minutes of playing it starts approaching 90c and the fans are going crazy, but If I tab out or open the Q menu, then it pretty much immediately drops to around 60c and the fans slow back down. I have it open right now and it's sitting at 61/62c, but if I tab back in, the temperature starts climbing immediately and hits 70c in less than a minute. As soon as I tab back out, it drops back to 62c. It got to 90c last night whilst I was playing, but I just closed the game when I saw that. It's only today that I've noticed it cooling down when I tab out. This PC is less than a month old so it's not dusty, all the fans are running, and I've had no trouble playing more graphically-insensitive games earlier today. It's just Garry's Mod that's been doing this. I turned all of my graphics settings down as low as they'd go and the problem still persisted, just it heats up a lot slower. My graphics card is an Asus R9 290, my processor is an Intel i5 4690k, and I'm running the game in windowed mode with multicore rendering enabled.

Yeah, that's how graphics cards work. When they're not under strain, the temperature plummets. Sounds like you might have some cooling issues in your case, though. You did make sure one of your case fans is pulling air in, and one is pushing it out, right?

I know they're supposed to get hot, but i don't think it's supposed to be getting to 90c when all i've done is load a map and spawn some props. I was pretty sure I'd mentioned it but I've played other games with no problems whatsoever. I didn't break 80c whilst playing GTA V and the other games I've played recently (CoD:Ghosts, World At War, Black Ops 1) haven't gotten anywhere near that hot either. It's just Garry's Mod that's been giving me problems.

[QUOTE=woolio1;47996132]Yeah, that's how graphics cards work. When they're not under strain, the temperature plummets. Sounds like you might have some cooling issues in your case, though. You did make sure one of your case fans is pulling air in, and one is pushing it out, right?[/QUOTE] He's only having it with gmod, and everything still renders while the Q menu is open so it's not that Try turning vsync on or setting fps_max in the console to something reasonable, it sounds like it's trying to render at 300fps just because it can

[QUOTE=kaze4159;47996164]He's only having it with gmod, and everything still renders while the Q menu is open so it's not that Try turning vsync on or setting fps_max in the console to something reasonable, it sounds like it's trying to render at 300fps just because it can[/QUOTE] Yeah, that makes more sense.

fps_max 60 seems to have fixed it, but I'll have to test it for a while and report back if it persists. Thanks for the help.

[QUOTE=FloaterTWO;47996657]fps_max 60 seems to have fixed it, but I'll have to test it for a while and report back if it persists. Thanks for the help.[/QUOTE] Remember always cap your fps according your screen's hertz, otherwise you are just torturing your GPU for no reason and killing it faster.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;47996924]Uhh.. Heat kills a GPU. Not by how many frames it can pull and besides most gpus unlike OPs one which clearly has dust in it and should be cleaned can withstand 75~c just fine. A high frame rate isn't gonna kill it any faster then running it at 60 or whatever.[/QUOTE] Not really talking about the heat but the usage, why render 600 frames when you screen is capable of showing only 60, that is 10 times extra usage for nothing.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;47996924]unlike OPs one which clearly has dust in it and should be cleaned[/QUOTE] This PC is less than a month old, so I doubt there's enough dust in there to seriously warrant cleaning it just yet. If there's any dust in there it's probably not anywhere near enough to impact the performance.