How to tell if I'm pushing my graphics card too far?

Once upon a time with a Radeon HD 5770, and a Dual-core AMD CPU (I can't remember the model)... I wondered what would happen if I maxed out all the advanced graphic settings for Portal (1). The first 3 minutes was fantastic, then I heard a odd click/bang and that was the end of that. The card never worked again.

Present day, I'm running a 3930k, Sabertooth x79, with a GeForce 670 Windforce OC graphics card, single 1080p monitor and no 3D (Yo Mang's golden build).

Besides researching what all the advance settings actually do; what precautions or tests can I do, to make sure I'm not pushing my graphics too far?

Cheers,

Mark

I know your probably looking for exact answers. I would say use Heaven engine on OSX and see if you can max the card out on the highest settings. I doubt that card will have any issues.

Anyway, good luck and congrats.

You were just unlucky. Maxing out settings shouldn't cause any harm to your gpu. It's made to run at 100% usage. What could of happend though is you had a bad psu, and the extra load caused it to feed a low voltage to your gpu causing it to blow.