Gaming on a Two-Monitor Single Videocard Setup

Once upon a time my friend had an old Radeon 9500 I think it was, and he was running two monitors from the single card, just as I am on my current GeForce 6200 setup. I don't know specifics, but he liked to game on one monitor, while using the other to monitor IM conversations and the like. Eventually, his card gave up on life and fried itself.

Ever since then, I have been wary of gaming on my dual monitor setup. To be on the safe side, I would disable the second monitor while I game, just to keep the GPU temperature at a reasonable level. I downloaded GPU-Z, and decided to start logging the GPU temperature values of my setup. Currently, I have Windows XP on my system, running two 1440x900 flatscreens from a single XFX GeForce 6200, 350 MHz core clock, 532 MHz memory clock. While idling at the desktop and performing menial web-browsing tasks, the GPU temperature hovers around 61 degrees Celsius. I disabled the secondary monitor and waited about 10 minutes to let the GPU cool to its new idling temperature. With only a single monitor, the temperature hovers around 57 degrees Celsius, 4 degrees lower.

To begin gaming testing, I disabled the secondary monitor. While playing a game at a resolution of 1440x900 @ 70Hz with highest settings (Neverwinter Nights if you must ask), the GPU temperature climbed as high as 84 degrees Celsius. With the secondary monitor enabled, GPU temperature went as high as 89 degrees Celsius.

There is no real definitive answer for how high is too high, as far as GPU temperatures go. The general consensus is that you shouldn't stray over 90 degrees Celsius. My simple tests are in no way completely accurate, as the temperature depends on many other things, such as airflow inside the case, ambient temperature, fan speed, and so on. Generally I would assume that it's safe to game with a second monitor attached that isn't really doing anything intensive, as the temperature seems to only differ by about +5 degrees Celsius.

One other thing I discovered in this experiment was that if the game you are playing relies on the mouse pointer being at the edge of the screen to rotate the view in the game, dual monitors are not very accomodating on the left or right side, depending which monitor you are playing on.