ATI Radeon 1900XTX and cooling

[Thrilla]

G'day .. I have been having a weird problem with my Radeon 1900 XTX. I have updated to the newest Radeon driver (Cat 7.7), which still does not fix my problem .. which is ..

Ever since the last few 1/2 dozen of Catalyst drivers, I've noticed that the fan on the card doesn't turn on to help cool the card. Only when I use ATItool and force it to run at a certain speed 100% of the time, does the card work in high graphic games (Oblivions, Stalker). With the latest Catalyst, I can atleast play WoW without forcing the fan on, however, Oblivion keeps on crashing. The screen goes black, and I can't recover save rebooting the PC.

Has anyone else had this problem? I could swear the earlier Catalyst worked the fan without a problem .. but now, nothing.

I can't tell if its a defunct card, because I can set ATItool to have it start the fan at a certain temp, but that doesn't always work.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

not sure if this helps but im 100% sure the fan will only ramp up when your gpu temps hit a certain degree. I also dont think the fan goes all the way up until about 75-80C. what are you load temps?

 

[Thrilla]

Right now, just having the desktop open and Firefox, temp goes down to 67deg. I was just playing Oblivion (which just crashed 30min ago after about 4mins of playing), and tabbed out to see the temp at 90deg. NO fan ramping.

Core is set to 648, mem at 774. According to ATItool monitor, current fan speed it 27.5%, with a avg of 50%.

Normally, I wouldn't call this a problem. However, over the past 1-2 months, its been spotty, and the only fix that "worked" was forcing the fan to run at a certain % (usually 70-80% speed).

Either the driver isn't working right .. my card is going kaput .. or my fan on it is kaput. The drivers, I have blown away any resemblance of previous drivers before upgrading. And the card works when I force a speed. I do however not remember the card running this warm while on the desktop. In Catalyst 6 series, the card was running cooler, and the fan worked, however, tabbing in and out of games often made any game I had lock the PC.

 

[Thrilla]

Well .. not using the *default* GPU and Memory clock seems to help .. but negates the fact the card should be pushing harder.

 

[CP5670]

I have always gotten this problem regardless of the drivers I used. The fan speeds up but not fast enough to counteract the increasing temperatures, and it always crashes after a while. I instead set ATI Tray Tools to run it at a fixed 80% whenever a game loads up, which I prefer over the variable fan sound pitch anyway.