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6970 - FPS, performance issues

hazish

hazish

hazish

Associate
Joined
25 Dec 2011
Posts
6
Hi guys,

I received an MSI 6970 + 12GB of Corsair Vengeance ram for christmas yesterday, expecting to get a small but welcome improvement to certain newer games, namely Skyrim, Batman and BF3, before an overhaul in the new year...

From the get go, my computer seemed a lot slower, from simple operations to boot time. Every game I tried with the new card (all of the above including stuff like Deus Ex, Rage, Dead Island, Sonic Gens...) had this pulsating, choppy framerate problem - imagine constantly depressing and letting up on a car accelerator with 2 second intervals. Also, my case also got insanely hot after 5 minutes of gaming with the fan going full tilt, and I hadn't even cranked the graphics past medium on most titles. I couldn't understand why my single fan 5850 is miles quieter, cooler and all round better when under stress.

I tried all Catalyst driver versions (along with Driver Sweeper and registry cleaners between installs) from 11.7 onwards, including the newest preview drivers to no avail. I put my 5850 back in, reinstalled the latest Cats and was back to normal - suggesting that this could be a hardware problem.

I'm running an Intel i5 (OC'd to 3.5ghz), Gigabyte P55-UD5, 12GB Vengeance, 2xHDD's and the Corsair H50 cooler - no case fans, through a 620w Corsair modular PSU.

My first suspicion was that the card is struggling for juice and I need a beefier power supply - there's an LED indicator on the back of the card, and the meter is not fully green, but I can't find any info as to what this indicates (the manual is more use as toilet paper).

Could this be a power related problem, is the card a dud, or is it something else entirely? A friend of mine has a pretty much identical build and has the Sapphire version on order, it'll be interesting to see if he runs into the same problems.

Cheers for any insight/suggestions. Been pulling my frickin' hair out over this.
 
Well it should be OK on that front then
You could try underclocking the card a little, see if it improves, not a solution but it sometimes highlights if it is the card
 
You need to uninstall the 5850 without restarting, power off, change cards, power on, let windows install generic driver, restart, then install the cats, not just swap the cards over, in case that's all you did.
 
Just tried the 6970 over a fresh install of Windows 7. Exactly the same problem - loaded up Arkham City, fans went absolutely wild and the game performed horribly with exactly the same graphics settings used with my 5850 earlier today. Very stop-start with massive dips in frame rates.

I really don't get why something with two fans running at 100% under exactly the same load as a 2 year old single fan card gets so hot (talking 90+ degrees). My room is currently like a sauna.

Worth contacting OCUK and possibly returning the card?
 
This does sound like a hardware fault :( nothing worse then getting all excited then bang nothing but problems.
I hope you get it sorted real quick.
 
Where are you based? Might be worth seeing if a friendly local ocuk member has a rig you can try this in
 
Load up MSI afterburner and have a look at the GPU temps, load, clock speed etc.

What case do you have?

The Twin Froza is a good card but the cooler doesn't extract the heat from the case like blower style cards. It may be your case cooling can't cope with all that heat dumped in it along with the CPU so it overheats. You say yourself the case is really hot after a few minutes.

Try taking the side off and pointing a cooling fan in. If you don't have a desktop fan then most electric fan heaters have a cold setting.

AD
 
I contacted OCUK and they asked me to check my case cooling, which is something I've overlooked in the past, so it prompted me to buy a new Zalman with 4 fans.

The case interior is an average 26 degrees with two fans taking in cool air, and two exhausts. The case is cool to the touch and my room no longer turns into a sauna, BUT...

The 6970 fans still go ******* insane when a game loads in (straight to 100%), with gpu-z reporting temps of between 90 and 103 degrees @ stock clock speeds after a couple of minutes play, and I'm still getting that killer frame lag, even though the fps counter stays fairly constant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuCcNURkIYE&feature=youtu.be

Recorded this video on fraps so you can see what I'm on about - if you look at the sprinting and fire animations you can see the smooth and consistent change. It might not be apparent to everyone, it's more a feel thing, and doesn't happen with my 5850. It's subtle, but enough to render intense games like this pretty much unplayable, especially during firefights and whatnot.

I'm thinking it's a dud card or some other hardware issue and I'll have to RMA it.
 
U got intel chip? Disable hyper threading first. Massive improvements by doing that.

Also, disable vsync if you have it on. Then set fps limiter in bf3 to 60. Google for that console command.

Temps are way too high. I think 90 is max...should sit at 80ish on
Max load.

What BF3 settings you got?
 
I don't think the card is dud. I think there is some other issue. Provide full specs of machine and BF3 settings.

That will help us help u.
 
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