AMD Drivers causing 5970x2 to overheat?

[AMMUT]

Hi, my brother has a HIS Radeon 5970x2 in his machine that has been working fine for him until recently.

He updated the drivers to v12 and then v12.1 and the card has been giving trouble since leaving the v11.8/9 drivers. The temperatures seem to be getting very high on it, even when it's even idling.

We have taken the card out and made sure that the fan was clear of dust etc.

Could the new drivers be causing problems with the automatic fan controller? Does anyone else that has a similar card experience the same problems?

We are going to put the old drivers on and see if it cures the problem this weekend, but just thought I would check if anyone else had similar experiences.

He's using one of my 6870 cards in his machine for the minute and the 12.1 drivers are giving no bother.

 

[CinderzFTW]

could be.. drivers effect hardware in different ways.. if i install the latest sound drivers to my motherboard my system crashes lol... same with the ethernet... so I have stuck with the older drivers.. and everything is fine.

roll back the drivers to 12.1 or 11.12 or what ever you were using before and you should be fine.

try using MSI Afterburner to watch your temps and play around with you fan speed/settings for the card using MSI:AB.

Also, any overclock on the card itself?

 

[Turb3k]

Good reply from cinderz, couldnt add much more my self! Just roll them back if temps drop then leave the drivers untill some new ones come out, try them if problem starts again repeat steps one and two kind of thing untill you find some stable ones!
Fingers crossed for you mate

 

[CinderzFTW]

Another thing when rolling back the drivers etc... if that doesn't work... uninstall the drivers, download driver sweeper and get rid of anything to do with AMD Drivers... your running an intel processor so nothing else on the board will be effected apart from GPU, restart the pc, go to the amd website and download the 11.12 drivers from there.

This will be like reinstalling windows and downloading the latest drivers basically.. no old drivers in the way!

Hope this helps!

 

[d_brennen]

Has he actually took the card out and had a look at it close up? If it is gradually getting hotter and more unstable it could be suffocating on dust or the hsf may have worked itself loose somehow, making bad contact with the core/RAM/vrms

Edit: To clarify, the heatsink fins may be clogged, it may look visibly clear at the fan aperture

 

[TAC4U]

What sort of problems are you talking about? My 5970 recently failed, though it was overclocked for the full two years that I owned it and I had just tried to increase the overclock - I fully accept it was my own fault. For me the problems were artifacts in games (triangles sticking out of objects; flickering, etc) and eventually on the desktop, with solid coloured squares and driver crashes when watching YouTube videos. I opened up the card to see if it was anything obvious (build up of dust, faulty connection) but ended up having to throw it away. I certainly wouldn't class myself as well off, so I was disappointed that my £550 card was now scrap but I was looking to upgrade anyway.

As for temps, the 5970 runs pretty hot at the best of times. How hot are we talking?

 

[chief barker]

What sort of problems are you talking about? My 5970 recently failed, though it was overclocked for the full two years that I owned it and I had just tried to increase the overclock - I fully accept it was my own fault. For me the problems were artifacts in games (triangles sticking out of objects; flickering, etc) and eventually on the desktop, with solid coloured squares and driver crashes when watching YouTube videos. I opened up the card to see if it was anything obvious (build up of dust, faulty connection) but ended up having to throw it away. I certainly wouldn't class myself as well off, so I was disappointed that my £550 card was now scrap but I was looking to upgrade anyway.

As for temps, the 5970 runs pretty hot at the best of times. How hot are we talking?

Bloody hell I was lucky then.

I had been running my 5970 overclocked for 18 months then sold it with my 5870 for £430 a month ago.