Overheating? Plz help.

[DCh@se]

I have had problems with artifacting for a while now and just recently I found out artifacting is caused by overheating. So today I went and bought a bottle of compressed air to spray out the dust in my computer. Now that all the dust is gone my computer is still artifacting when I play BF2. What is the problem? How can I fix it? Also my computers temperature is always at 54 degrees C which I dont know if thats overheating or not.

Specs: WinXp Pro Sp2, NVIDIA GeForce 6800, 2.16 GHz processor (AMD Athlon XP 3000+) , 1 GB RAM.

[SgT.uK]

artifacting isnt necessarily caused by overheating. have you overclocked your graphics card? if you have then my guess is that you have oc'ed it a bit too far and that is what is causing the artifacting.

[ConscriptVirus]

does artificating come like at the beginning of ur game or much later cuz much later could still signify overheating (its spring and its getting warmer) and do u have a fan around ur vid card? sometimes even wthout ocing..ur comp can overheat with bad air flow

[DCh@se]

I havent Overclocked my video card but the artifacting starts at around 10mins into playing the game. Could it also be a driver problem?

[Emagerix]

Whats overclocking, and artifacting?.... Sorry for off topic

[DCh@se]

Overclocking is where you tweak your videocard so you get the maximum power out of it and artifacting is a graphical problem that causes odd deformed textures in the game. Thx for the posts guys I got the problem fixed. It was just a little too hot but now that I have a fan next to it its acting fine.

[sackynut]

you should probably look into new cooling or something else, because if it is ABLE to get to that heat of artifacting, its going to die soon most likely and even if it isnt thats not good for it.

[Blak_Phoenix]

Overclocking is more than just tweaking it. Its where you raise the Core clock, memory clock, clock mulitplier, etc etc, above the "stock" speeds. It voids most warranties and can shorted the life span of your hardware, it also generates more heat. But on the up side, you get more performance out of it.