Signs of an overheated video card?

[Dokujisan]

I used a laptop (HP Pavilion ZD7000) that is known for getting pretty hot. I have it propped up so that airflow get get underneath the laptop during gaming. Over the last couple of weeks or so, I have been experiencing a terrible lag with the clock symbol showing up. This only happens after a couple of hours of gaming. I can check my ping and it is anywhere from 60-120 ms. It doesn't show and packet loss. The FPS skyrocket to 300+ as my screen is frozen for a couple seconds. I look at my HD light and it isn't lit up or anything.

I have Ubuntu and WinXP on this laptop and I have played Nexuiz using both. It runs a little faster in Windows for some reason so I've been playing it in Windows recently, but I've been experiencing these problems while playing the game in both operating systems.

So... what are the symptoms of an overheated video card? That's my best guess. Got any ideas?

[esteel]

if my laptop gets too hot the fps drop a huge bit.. if you see the clock and have bad lag maybe the heat is too much for your network adapter but not your gfx card.
Well you can try to use cl_maxfps 100 to put a limit on the engine, maybe it reduces the heat it creates a bit.. (1000 is the default)

[:)]

I have my laptop set to cl_maxfps 60, to match the LCD display refresh rate.

To monitor your video card temperature in Windows, use speedfan: http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

[Dokujisan]

awesome... thanks Dave and esteel. I will try that software and use that max_fps setting.