Quote Originally Posted by Squa11_Leonhart View Post
*snip*
Sorry about the snip, but quoting all of that would have put me over SE's stupid 1000 character limit.


My comments about the "danger zone" are all taken from personal experience and relate to Nvidia's cards between the 400-500 series.
My comments on throttling are also taken from personal experience when related to the 600-700 series cards.

You are right about the temperatures for the 600 and 700 series cards being higher (70C and 80C respectively), I was simply trying to recall from memory when I made the post. I'll edit it to reflect the correct information.

My personal observations include a GTX 670 and GTX 780 dropping well below their "base clock" when over 80C with the lowest clock at 732mhz where it no longer dropped.

As far as the 500 series goes... I have gone through about 4 different GTX 570s which all started to artifact at above 80C and one's transistors even melted at a sustained 93C (don't buy MSI...).
The biggest problem I have with the 600 and 700 series cards IS the GPU Boost 1.0/2.0 as it causes some "frame rating issues" (smooth frame rate vs. number of frames per second) when it kicks the Boost in. To combat this, I simply overclock it so that it never needs to Boost, but I also needed to install additional cooling so that it would never throttle the speed down above a certain temperature.
The listed factors are complete bull, I'll always trust someone with personal experience over someone who just reads off of a tech article.