Question about mac pro gfx card

[allupons]

Is there a way to monitor the temps / fan speed of the graphics card in the 2010 mac pro. I have tried out a few utilities but nothing seems to actually reflect either the temp or speed of the graphics card itself. The reason I am curious is because last night directly following one restart I had a bunch of weird visual artifacts all over the screen until i restarted again. They all went away and havent returned since on multiple restarts trying to recreate the issue, but all I could think of was possibly overheating even though i wasnt doing anything intense at the time. Any thoughts?

[jedijoe]

istat menus, istat pro, istat nano (dashboard widget) .. the widget is free, the menus are $16USD, not sure about iStat Pro

[Cindori]

none of those monitors gfx temps yet afaik

[macz1]

Because there is no reliable OS X tool (yet) for this purpose, I would suggest to check the temps and run some tests in Windows. Doing so will quickly show whether there is a general hardware problem (bad chips, badly applied heatsink/thermal paste) or not. But keep in mind that GPU idle temps can be relatively high because usually the fan is kept as silent as possible.
Probably the artifact are due to the mediocre graphics support of OS X.

[thagomizer]

Which card do you have?

Once when rebooting from Windows back to OS X (after some intense Crysis benchmarking in Windows), my screen was filled with artifacts during and after the OS X boot. They went away after I put the computer to sleep and woke it up.

I have a six-core Mac Pro with the 5870, and an HP LP 3065 through the DVI port. I didn't think to check the temps in Windows, but the fan was running at full blast during the bench runs. (Not very loud, though).

[thagomizer]

I hate to say it, but the artifacts reminded me of the last days of my 8800 GT before it died....