Reference 6950 Crazy temps

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:10

Okay, i have a reference HIS 6950 that i bought at the end of december. I waited a month or so and i unlocked the shaders on hte card - still working fine. I had the fan set to user define in afterburner to a 1:1 fan speed to temp ratio, and it never went above about 65C on full load, and about 35 idle. Recently i upgraded my motherboard and cpu from a 780 chipset and 695BE to an 890GX chipset and an 1100t. the card worked fine for a day or two and now it is idling at over 50 degrees @50% fan speed which it never did before!

Just wondering what the problem may be. By the end of the year i'm looking to upgrade the cooling to an Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus II, so that should col it down and reduce the noise as well, but i's becoming unbearable now as my room, case and GPU are heating up a lot even when no programs are open.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:22

all the dust is blown out, i underclocked the card so it's idling at 625/250
whats crazy is that its idling at 49 now and even with a huge fan blowin air onto the card and the fan speed at 100% (6000 rpm) it is only dropping 1 degree a minute which is stupid as it usually should drop at least 10!

at normal clocks and the same fans it idles at 59!

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:23

I have a cm690II advanced with a H70 and 2 140mm fans up top, a 140mm fan at the front and the 2 120mm fans on the H70.

Now i turn the fan down to 1:1 again, and turn the huge fan off and it goes up a degree and idles at 50.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:28

Cleeecooo said:
put fan to 100% manually. Then wait till it gets back to usual temps. Now put fan control back to auto and monitor temps to see if it goes up

thats what i did do. it's idling around 50/51 and going up ever so gradually.
if i turn off user define and keep auto on, the fan goes down to 26 and the temp goes up and up and up

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:32

oh, and i forgot to mention that i've just reverted to the original 6950 bios/shaders too.

auto still on. fan speed 29% and temps 60C
core 250, memory 625.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:35

core clock jumps to 500 whn i move a window or open a program and temp jumps about 5 degrees also.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:46

because if i don't then the temps go up another 10 degrees.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:49

well, like i said, it worked perfecly fine for months at stock 6970 speeds - i just reduced the clocks for this test when i opened the thread. I have 3 screens (3240x1920), but that hasn't been a problem at all running games at that resolution (i got the same temps running any demanding game at that res as i am getting at idle now.)

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:52

done that already. I'm running Opera, and without AB the temp just rockets.

Cleeecooo said:
Makes no sense at all LOL

how? reducing clocks, reduces heat. increasing clocks increases heat.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 13:58

well like i said! the temps were fine when i still had 3 screens. only using one screen reduces temps by about 5 degrees which is still higher than what it was idling at before with all 3 screens enabled, and clocks at higher levels.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 14:09

i know about voltage, bumping it down to 0.900 reduces temps by a couple of degrees and that's it.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 14:25

gareth170 said:
this is mine
gpu1 = 6950

yeah, the bottom one was about my temps before this happened, but the fan speed was about 30 rather than 25 like yours.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 14:28

Looks like no games for me until this is sorted. I just put portal 2 on, and within 10 seconds the temperature was 85 degress at 85% fan speed and counting.
this is at stock settings,so voltage shouldnt have any effect on it - its defualt voltage.
usually it stays at about 65 degrees.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 14:32

Cleeecooo said:
Maybe the thermal grease somehow got ****ed up?

Dry a driver reinstall to see if drivers are causing the games to fail. It sounds more like a hardware problem though. I suggest you RMA, firstly, run your games with 100% fan and monitor the temps.

maybe that's the case.
i'll revet to 11.5b and see what happens.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 14:37

i just uninstalled the drivers and restarted the computer and it was up to 70C before AB had the chance to start. (about 10 seconds from boot)

hmm, there may be a problem with the drivers. whenever install catalyst suite, the visual 2010 redistributable fails to install - the problem has been occuring since then. :\ hmm...

Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 RedistributableFinal Status: Fail
Version of Item: 10.0.30319
Size: 9 Mbytes

everything seemed to work fine though (program wise) except for this temperature problem.

gonna try it on a clean windows installation to try out.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 14:59

yeah i'm gonna.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 15:16

drunkenmaster said:
Disable MSI completely, uninstall it if you have to, revert everything to stock, then see what temps are like idle, MSI won't work perfectly with every single combo out there, and it has lots of weird quirks even when it works fine.

done. 60degrees and getting hotter.

Clocks make little difference in temp, voltage makes a big difference.

true, but when i reduced the clocks to minimum it went down to 50

There are situations in which multi monitors won't enable the higher clock and most people get flickering in this scenario but some people don't, are you sure idle clocks and voltage were the same. Memory won't make much if any difference to temps.

i'm using exactly the same settings as before the problem.

What heatsink do you have on the new cpu vs the old one, is the heat being blown right out of the heatsink into the intake of your gpu, is it closer, have you disabled the chipset gpu properly and its reading the right temps?

before i had a coolermaster hyper tx-3 blowing air into the back of the case. now i have a H-70 blowing air out of the back of the case.
chipset should be disabled, but i'm not sure. temps are right. my feet are sweating just sitting next to it.

35 idle and 65 load simply sound very low in the first place for a reference card, unlocked to a 6970 basically(clocks and voltage?). Well okay it doesn't sound bad if it was running at 65% fan speed for 65C, which is insane. I've never run a reference AMD fan past about 40% because its ridiculously loud even by then, above 60 its horrifically loud and theres no need. The cards will happily run at 80c.

with stock settings my pc locks up when it gets to 90 (when i forgot to turn on the custom fan profile)

What was the weather like with previous temps, my systems running much hotter today than a couple months ago.

a lot cooler than when we had the heatwave last month (worked perfectly then)

As for things for the driver failing to install, generally not a good sign, have you run all the windows updates as there is often updates for Visual in there, it might have failed simply because you had a newer version installed, or it may need a previous upgrade first, who knows.

every update has installed. that's why i'm trying a clean install as there are a few things messed up with my current one.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 15:34

Clean install done. catalyst 11.5b installed. running at 70 degrees idle with default settings an no changes.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 16:23

right. i bit the bullet and opened up the card, wiped the thermal junk off and put some of my own ocz freeze that i had lying about and now its down to 45C @45 fan as before

Too bad i had to open the card though - although i was gonna do it anyway with the new cooler.

Alasdairhurst · 1 Aug 2011 at 16:46

Too bad my warranty is voided though

Thanks for the help guys