Shouldn't a 3870 slow down when idle?

[OrphanBoy]

I recently got a Powercolor 3870, and despite being still annoyed by the fan, I've also noticed that the thing never reduces its clocks when idle. Shouldn't this new powerplay lark do this?
The card always sits at 796 MHz on the core, 1170 MHz on the RAM regardless of what's going on. Both the CCC and RivaTuner can cofrim this. I've not overclocked the card, so I don't think it's that I've 'forced' the clocks to these speeds.

Any ideas?

 

[OrphanBoy]

Cool, thanks.
(I had assumed that searching for '3870 too fast' would yield too many results!)

 

[OrphanBoy]

Hi again, sorry but I can't really find anything about WHY there is no 2D clocks step-down on this card. Yeah other people have this too, but there doesn't seem to be anything more than that!

 

[OrphanBoy]

My GeCube branded (factory overclocked) card does this too (i.e. has no powerplay feature). It's a shame really because that was one of the reasons why I purchased it.

Cool, glad someone else gets this! I also bought the card hoping for the power saving when the thing's idle. However I'm not so sure that powerplay is disabled - I'm also getting that condition where the gpu usage (in the CCC and RivaTuner) constantly jumps back and forth between 50 and 100% in game play for no reason...yet the clocks aren't changing with this!

Starting to get more and more annoyed with this card...