I recently finished my first build and overall it’s been really great. The only issue I’ve had has been with games crashing to Vista after 1-2 hours of play. I’m pretty sure this is because of my video card overheating (a Sapphire 4870x2), because it’s reaching 93C after just 15 minutes of l4d.
I’ve gone into the ATI overdrive settings in Catalyst and set the fan speed to manual, and sure enough, the fan kicked in (its loud) and the temps dropped severely. I went from about 70 to 74C idle to 38C at 50% fan speed. On auto, I don’t think I ever heard the GPU fan really kick in during games…
Could anyone recommend appropriate overdrive settings/temp ranges/fan speeds for this card? What would you say are the ideal idle/max temps and overdrive settings for the card? Is it okay to keep the fan speed on manual as opposed to automatic? I ran auto-tune, and my specs at the moment are:
GPU: 790mhz (800 is the max)
Memory: 990mhz (1000 max)
Fan speed: 35%
Temp: 46C idle
Now that my idle temps are much lower, I’ll play l4d again and see what the temps are like after an hour…or see if it crashes again. Any tips/advice are much appreciated!
The ‘reference design’ fan/heatsink on any of the ATI 48xx series cards sucks raw ass. If manually tweaking the fan speed higher doesn’t really end up working out for you, you can always look at 3rd party fan/heatsink, and replace the stock thinger.
As for the the ideals, I believe the card/chips are supposed to be able to run up to 105C, but that’s really pushing it to the edge… personally, anything over 85C would probably drive me to seek out a 3rd party cooler.
I have a 4850 so my specifics may vary but the principle remains the same. What I’ve done is created multiple profiles in the Catalyst software with different fan speeds and put icons on the desktop to activate the chosen profile. For instance, I have 2 icons now, one for 20% fan for general computing and another at 50% for gaming. At 20% I’m showing 67C and I can’t hear the fan at all. At 50% the fan is LOUD but it keeps the chip pretty cool while gaming and when I’m done, I run the 20% icon.
Check out the Profiles tab in the ATI Control panel thingy and you’ll see what I mean. Works pretty well.
I tried setting the fan speed on my 4850 manually to various settings, but eventually went back to the automatic setting, as it works just fine, and the fan never gets loud enough to bother me at the modestly over-clocked settings I run with.
If you think 50% fan speed is loud, try 100% sometime. ;)
Thanks for the responses. For now, I’ve kept the fan at 40%, and after an hour of playing the max temp has been about 70C, and it didn’t crash. I think I’ll also try out the profiles feature in Catalyst to keep things quiet when not playing games.
I also had to turn down the overdrive settings, as it created some weird flickering effects in left 4 dead. That can’t be good :.
For two weeks I struggled to get a 4870x2 to run even sort of well in my well-ventilated and cooled desktop box. I cranked up the fan speed to leaf blower mode, then went even higher into “standing under a 747” mode. No dice. As soon as I put the card under a heavy load, it went into temperature panic and eventually shut down.
Happened on two separate 4870x2 cards, from 2 separate manufacturers.
I finally got fed up and switched to a 280 gtx, and have never had a problem, nor seen the nVidia card go above 52c, even under heavy load.
As far as I’m concerned, the 4870x2 is a brilliant concept and terrible execution. I cannot recommend anyone stick with it.
Yeah, I’ll give it a month or so…I have other games to buy as well, so if I notice problems with those I may sell it and go nvidia.
After doing a little more research I think its l4d/vista that’s causing the issue, not my card…a lot of people using vista 64 (like me) are reporting problems…I just played Bioshock for 3 hours and had no issues.
