Can griefers cause physical damage to my PC?

[MicahB]

I heard it said recently that some griefers have been known to use huds that somehow cause damage to the video card, thus causing your PC to become useless. Is this true? How can I protect myself if it is true?

[Ashy Calcutt]

I been in sl going on 5 years in may and never heard of a Griefer  harming anybody's computer but im not expert

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

No, they can't. the person who is telling you this is winding you up.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

Yes, there is a griefer tool that rezzes a cube that plays nothing but Rick Astleys video over and over. The massive throwback to the 80's is far too much for any computer to handle and the video card melts down to a pile of slag.

[MIstahMoose]

Worse that can happen is your graphics card or processor overheats and causes SL to crash. But to prevent this SL has all sorts of graphic settings and code on how to render data . IE if cubes are spammed a lot will be rendered, but cubes completely hidden from your camera will not.

[Chic Aeon]

I heard awhile back from some very high profile and seemingly responsible people that there was indeed a greifer tool that could do that. Before The Lab cleaned up the Realms I ran into what I believe was that tool a few times on "the field of orange" .

I have a hefty machine. It brought it screamingly to a halt at 1fps.  I don't run shadows on the realms and I typically can get up to 145 fps without shadows. I got out of their licketly split and all was well. I haven't had any issues in many months though.

If you do run into a time when your machine seems to slow to a halt (usually when you enter a sim that has this running), close SL as fast as you can. No point in taking a chance.

That is what I did and would do again.

[Perrie Juran]

The only (confirmed) instance I have heard of a card dieing was someone with a five year old card that was already giving them troubles. Really the card was already on it's death bed.

[AnnMarie Otoole]

I reported a parcel with 2 griefing objects.  I discovered the problem when my computer started to freeze, including the clock and mouse.  I turned on the temperature reporting on the graphics card and sure enough, the closer I got to the objects the faster the temperature rose until the computer would freeze.

Having burned out 2 previous graphics cards on SL (running 3840 x 1080 resolution with 70+ fps) I got the hell out of there and reported it to the Lindens.

They responded rapidly and removed the objects and the resident account.  By studying the object a bit at a time from a distance I analyzed its construction.  There was nothing magical about it, it had no scripts and nothing in the anti-griefing controlos that would prevent it being re-created however I'm not about to reveal its construction.

The responding Linden was apparently able to analyze it safely by de-rendering, or somehting equivalent, so the graphics card was not struggling to resolve it.

I have no doubt that a gaphics card with marginal cooling problems could be physically damaged by this object.