Overheating my Graphics Card

Recently I'm getting messages that say the graphics cards are overheating for some strange reason. I do have a graphics card cooling system and the only main programs I run constantly is chrome, Photoshop CS6, and Guild Wars 2. If anyone could help that would be great, it would save me a heck of a lot of money.

Running 2 Nvidia 660's on i7 3770k.
PSU: 1000 Watt.

Easy solution, Clean your PC from dust and/or remove it from stuffy corner

Well, you say you have a GPU cooling system? How is it set up? An after market heatsink cooler/water block? What case do you use? You can always install Speedfan and monitor your temperatures within there.

I use an Artic Twin Turbo cooler (heatsink). I haven't had a problem until now. As to the dust, I try to keep it clean.
Case 650D.
Downloading Speedfan. Hopefully that will help see what's wrong.
One quick thing...can heat made from the Memory be a problem?

Something like MSI Afterburner can help you push the fan speeds up (that automatically increase in speed when the cards are hot), and monitor temps. But it might make your cards run significantly louder depending how much you abuse it.

When did you actually install the heatsinks? What thermal paste did you use as well? Also it's pretty rare for your ram to generate so much heat as to have such negative affects (based on what you said you use the machine for).

I don't have any heat problem with the ram I was just asking if that would be a plausible thing that could occur.

I installed the heatsinks a little over two months ago, used a paste by Arctic, forgot which one though. Is there any chance that would be an issue? I believe it was carbon based but not to sure.

Arctic silver is a decent go to brand of thermal paste. Did you move your rig recently? Check your heatsinks didn't get dislodged or loose and/or the fans are actually running on the heatsinks (none of them were duds or spun out).

Using MSI afterburner like the others said would be wise too if you see the fans not kicking in early enough.

Arctic silver is good, using it myself.
Do you have enough air flow inside case itself? i would suggest setting inside case in and out fans so that same air doesn't just spin inside.
You see increase in temperature probably cos its summer, my temp inside pc jumped 10c whit summer time.
If nothing else helps you can always go water cooling.

PS: what is temperature on cards at 90% workload ? what is temp on cpu ? how about motherboard ?
just check what your sensors are saying whit some monitoring tool.

I fixed the issue. Apparently my main graphics card was defective. During the winter month it remained functional but when the hot air hit...well things happen.

I did take measures to prevent any more overheatings and sped up the fans.

i wonder if card was defective from start or just became defective after reaching high temp during summer.
105c is about max that card can take, anything above 95 is dangerous, and when its 30+ outside and you play demanding game or something its very easy to reach 100 whit air cooling.

Actually, 2 things could have happened.

1) The fans on the aftermarket heatsink derped out
2) The aftermarket heatsink fans have performance that is misregulated automatically by the card that assumes it has its factory heatsink and fans. Unless of course, those fans are set to a constant rpm, in which case this point is moot.

I ended up taking the defective Graphics Card. If it was the temp. here in Salt Lake with been reaching about the high 80's..I think it was the summer temp though. Winter is pretty cool.

May I know the sub vendor(asus/msi/evga)? Or is it NVIDIA? A photo of it(your VGA, in your casing) also screen shot of the temp will be helpful

Already fixed the issue, but originally it was running at around 80C on avereage for the main G-card (EVGA).

I do have to buy some liquid cooling because temps outside are reaching near the 100F range.

Good to know. FYI, evga do deliver the best performance compared among all other NVIDIA sub vendors but they tend to use NVIDIA's reference cooler design in a slightly better way(with the exception of the newly released GTX 700 series).

As you already know the NVIDIA also use GPU BOOST to increase the core clock but there is a catch which is at certain temperature, it will reduce the boost and core clock to decrease the temperature. Which makes the performance - temperature ratio bad IMHO.

If I may suggest, next time you want to purchase another GTX card, please consider purchasing ones with better cooling system i.e. MSI's Twin Frozr or Inno3D iChill. Lower temperature = higher and longer BOOST.

try adding more casefans 120mm is around 10$
so add as much fans as posseble in your case
this should inprove the cooling.