My 7970 Gets hot :(

C

CousinVin

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 11, 2009
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393
I recently attempted to bump up the clock speeds of my 7970 but I own a reference design MSI card. I left the fan speed on auto simply because the sound is almost unbearable at anything more than 50%, and I was seeing at least 80*c at load. Is this normal?

I will be watercooling some time soon anyway, but what kind of acceptable OC's/temps should I be seeing here?
 
What app? Unigine Heaven 4.0 for example, really pushes the GPU this time around. Almost to Furmark levels. It's pretty much normal but there is a point you can increase the fan up to thats a combination of bearable and alittle annoying.;)
 
Around 91*c @1250 pumping 1.225v my 7950 gives up the ghost on the stock air cooler. You should do quite well when you get it watercooled.
 
Although 80* is normal I gaurantee its somewhat to do with the thermal paste application. This is a known problem from MSI. I removed the cooler on my msi 7950, removed msi's thermal paste(which was sloppy and WAY too much), and applied some mx-4. Temps went from high 80's to mid 60s!
 
Interesting. But at that rate if I'm taking the cooler off, I may as well just spring for the waterblock and do it all in one go.

I should mention, it is even more surprising that i hit temps like this because of where the computer is. It is in a basement with very low ambient temps.
 
You definitely need to check the TIM on your 7970, a lot of reference cards had it applied poorly.
 
with Auto fan and o/ced to 1125/1575(stock volts) with 74-78f ambient temps i my card reaches 86c during long gaming/benchmark sessions, including heaven and the new valley benchmark.

88-90c seems to be when the fan really ramps up...so it must be OK according to AMD.

i would start worrying if it went any higher than that.
 
Scheibler1 said:
Although 80* is normal I gaurantee its somewhat to do with the thermal paste application. This is a known problem from MSI. I removed the cooler on my msi 7950, removed msi's thermal paste(which was sloppy and WAY too much), and applied some mx-4. Temps went from high 80's to mid 60s!
Click to expand...

I had a very similar experience with a 7970 Lightning edition. I contacted MSI support and they flat out told to try replacing the TMI and if that didn't work to RMA the card. Like you, I saw an immediate 20° drop.
 
CousinVin said:
Interesting. But at that rate if I'm taking the cooler off, I may as well just spring for the waterblock and do it all in one go.

I should mention, it is even more surprising that i hit temps like this because of where the computer is. It is in a basement with very low ambient temps.
Click to expand...

It's not hard to remove the cooler. Literally four screws and it comes right off. Took me less then 10min to remove and apply new paste
 
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