could i have damaged my card by running without heatsink?

I replaced my card from 6990m to 675m.
I didnt have the x brackets for the 675m and was too eager to see if the card was functional
I tried booting up the laptop and it ran for about 1 minute give or take before it heat shutdown

Then the stupidity of the act hit me and now im wondering if running the card without a heatsink for about 2 minutes could damage a gpu?

 

Easily so, yes. That's a rather foolish thing to ask. You wouldn't run a car without a cooling system of some kind or a CPU without the heatsink would you? Same idea.

I don't think anything bad came of overheating the GPU once, but yes, it was a bad idea to be completely honest. I know my machine has shut off numerous times from just that and it still runs today.

 

Could damage it, thing is, that it shut down itself with its own thermal shutdown limits, so hopefully the temperature didnt rise too quickly that it didnt have the time to shut down fast enough. Damage might have been done, who knows. Best to test it when you have the heatsink fully fitted.

 

Good thing it wasn't a 680m. 6990m and 675m have almost the same performance don't they?

Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 2

 

I think the chips of these days are so safe that it wouldn't damage itself.
Seen alot of tests and these days they always turn off before they breakdown.

But it's still possible i think

 

Its unlikely the GPU or the system was damaged.
This is why computers have a shutoff point upon reaching a certain temperature - so that the said hardware wouldn't be damaged.

Anyway, don't worry about that.
Next time, just install the heatsink and don't run the laptop without that.

 

Thanks for the responses.

Any definitive way to check for hardware damage once i get the heatsink equipped and the laptop running?

 

I don't think it can kill the card (I did the same thing once just to see if it will boot up, without the backplate though), after all it will just shut down around 100C (which is way below to kill the card in an instant), BUT what may have happened is a short (if the card ever touched something metal on the backplate or any part of your laptop), then it is GG, heat-wise it should be ok though (btw at least you padded the card against the back of mobo right?)

 

I would use a benchmark program like 3dmark11 and just do a few runs in succession, like 4-5 in a row, on all stock clocks stock voltage. I would not do Furmark.

If it's damaged you'll see artifacting or it will shut down again. Keep a close eye on your temperatures too using HWInfo or Throttlestop.

I would say you could just try to game, but games don't push the card as hard, and in my opinion it would be better to find the damaged card now then down the road when your warranty ends or you can't return it.

 

Depending on the quality of the GPU itself there could have been some damage. You can test it out using it properly and see how it behaves. Damaged GPUs not only can artifact, but can freeze and recover per intervals, constantly.

Luckily, as others have pointed out, there is less possibility of damage thanks to the system shutting down in emergency.

 

Maybe ...

I seen military grade 650M fail pretty quickly with improperly installed cooling.
As ryz said, they do freeze at random times without artifact.

 

military grade?

 

Off Topic...

Small form factor Intel 3rd gen mobile chipset boards with embedded Nvidia 650M designed for typical military (ab)use. Tested for to survive pretty harsh environment. like 1K+ drop, 30G launches, high ambient temps ...etc
They are just normal chips that are tested against higher standards. More testing, the more expensive.

 

Well if you didn't really stress the GPU then likely it is ok. If you were running an intense game or benchmark then perhaps, because the temperature rise would be so fast it could have exceeded the 100C threshold during the time that it would shut down. But you'd honestly have to run the GPU at about 120C for several minutes for it to fry. It should be able to handle very short spans (like seconds) at high temps.