4870 question (stability and temps)

[Danja]

Hello,

When I was playing Crysis a month or so ago, I noticed that it became unstable even at very low overclocks. It crashed even at a 40 mHz core bump and 0 memory bump so I ended up playing at stock clocks, and it worked pretty well. At the end during the last battle it crashed multiple times though. I got busy afterwards and haven't had time to muck with it but I got tired of studying for finals today and tried out furmark. I've attached a picture of my GPU-Z stats after an hour; they pretty much didn't vary for the last 55 minutes of the test. I notice that my memory temps are hovering around that 85 degree figure that I saw tossed around during a google search. Is that likely to be the cause of my instability? If it is, I'm thinking of dremeling out a second fan slot above the VRAM and putting a small fan it. I already have a 120 mm fan positioned directly over the gpu itself, and it seems to be doing a good job of keeping the core cool. Thoughts?

 

[4LC4PON3]

have you tried reseating the heatsink and using new thermal. i have a 4890 that at idle sits at 43c but at full load never breaks 65c. Im using MX-2. When i first got the card it had stock thermal and was hitting ultra high temps around 84-85c.

 

[hallowed_dragon]

After 2 years of having the 4870, this weekend I finally got around to clean it. I used to have load temps of 90+ degrees with 100% fan. I used MX-4 and cleaned the whole cooling solution and now I have load temps of 50 degrees with 30% fan. A good cleaning can do wonders.

 

[Danja]

Would applying thermal help my vRAM temps though? Is it even possible? The vRAM is cooled only by a radiator; no fan. It's this card.

Edit: The card is only 5 months old; i don't think it's accumulated much dirt. It looks fairly pristine.