Quote Originally Posted by Laraul View Post
A few months ago everytime I would start FFXIV, after a few minutes my system would spontaneously power completely down. Turns out some wood dust was preventing the GPU fan from spinning up. At idle the temperature was 95C. A fail safe* exists to prevent irreversible damage to the hardware components.

How did I fix it? I gave the fan a light tap to get it spinning. It's been working fine since. And this was SEVERAL DAYS with the GPU running at 95C. So I don't believe FFXIV is capable of "frying" your graphics card, nor is any other game.

And somewhat related, just because your GPU gets a little warm does not mean the game is poorly optimized. There is no correlation between how optimized a game engine is and how hot your GPU gets.

* "Fail safe" is a term I coined up, it may not necessarily be the technical term used officially
Yup, correct.... it's something that has been around since at least the days of the 7800GTX, and I know cause I remember my 7800GTX shutting down as it got too hot. (I still probably have the card somewhere in my computer component box. lol)