Radeon 9700 pro come with cooling problems

[Default]

I just got this card yesterday and slapped it in. Let me tell you it was terrible! Hard locks, booting back to desktop, and reboots :mad: . So i thought i would investigate the proble a bit further. The first place i went to was the heatsink :D . Once i pryed this off, to my dispair, they uesed a yellow thermal pad :mad: this is definatly not what i expect from a 600(canadian) dollar card! So i took a razor and scrapped it off. The next thing that i notice was that the clips did not hold hard enough to keep tension on the heatsink while it was upside down. Don't get me wrong, it would keep it in place but would not keep a tight fit. So i take a trip down to the hardware store and get some tiny nuts and bolts, 320 grit and 600 grit sand paper. Next up was to lap the heatsink and let me tell you this was least pleasing of all. The heatsink is very concave and it took atleast 30 min of lapping just to get the bugger flat :mad: Once i was done all of this i cleaned the heatsink, aplied a thin layer of artic silver and used the bolts to attach the heatsink instead of the funny looking clips. I'm happy to report that the radeon 9700 Pro now has a clean bill of health :D It runs all games and benchmarks consistantly without any crashes or reboots. But ohnestly ATi should really get thier act together on thier cooling for thier video cards, There is just no excuse for this. Personelly i would send it back if you felt you could not do what i just did. Other than that it is a great card

[dreamtfk]

Man that is some serious bs for a card that is supposedy the "best" on the market as of late. Yellow pad bah, what a bunch of crap.

On another note, what fps do you get in in a Q3 powered game with the 9700? I got a Ti4400 about 6 months back and now I got my eyes on the 9700 :p

[Penguin4x4]

ygpm

[Overclocker456]

I just got mine today too.. I didn't notice any problems yet. I agree the cooling isn't amazing but it's good for stock clocks. I also removed the yellow pad and used some Artic Silver Alumna, not SILVER, because there are little resistors there around the core. I also remove the stock fan and put a 60mm 24CFM fan on there. It helped bring temps down. I'm thinking of getting a 1U cooler for it, but we might have to RMA the card since they don't work with AGP 8X. So I don't wanna mod it yet. The card is beyond fast. It really makes the G4 look slow. Hitman 2 runs AMAZING on it. Default, how much can you oc your card? Mine seems to be ok at 350/330..

[dabest]

well it has a killer gpu which is fast but then ofcourse its hot!

[Silversinksam]

Can you elaborate? Was this a Made by Ati card or an OEM partner that made this 9700?

[Default]

Originally posted by Silversinksam
Can you elaborate? Was this a Made by Ati card or an OEM partner that made this 9700?

made by ati. Even with the heatsink i put on the heat speader on the back, that area is still boiling :mad: i'll put on water cooling tomorrow :D already put the ram sinks on ;)

[Default]

Originally posted by Overclocker456
I just got mine today too.. I didn't notice any problems yet. I agree the cooling isn't amazing but it's good for stock clocks. I also removed the yellow pad and used some Artic Silver Alumna, not SILVER, because there are little resistors there around the core. I also remove the stock fan and put a 60mm 24CFM fan on there. It helped bring temps down. I'm thinking of getting a 1U cooler for it, but we might have to RMA the card since they don't work with AGP 8X. So I don't wanna mod it yet. The card is beyond fast. It really makes the G4 look slow. Hitman 2 runs AMAZING on it. Default, how much can you oc your card? Mine seems to be ok at 350/330..

i'm not even tuching clock cantrols untill i watercool this beast. Also i still need to get the latest driver for the card. Hmm. think i'll do that right now.

[grunjee]

I love ATi... have an 8500 which I love, and plan to get a 9700 some day... but the whole cooling situation (or lack thereof) is getting out of hand. ATi really needs to do something about it!

You're marketing a top of the line, $400 card, and can't put some ramsinks on the thing? Please. I can't even believe that stuff about the yellow pad! :mad:

[Overclocker456]

Originally posted by grunjee
I love ATi... have an 8500 which I love, and plan to get a 9700 some day... but the whole cooling situation (or lack thereof) is getting out of hand. ATi really needs to do something about it!

You're marketing a top of the line, $400 card, and can't put some ramsinks on the thing? Please. I can't even believe that stuff about the yellow pad! :mad:

umm ok relax. Almost Every G4 video card comes with a thermal pad. And Ramsinks really don't do that much. They just look nice. At stocks speeds the card has no cooling issues at all..

[Default]

maybe the geforce4 have no cooling problems at stock speed, but what i'm saying is that the radeon 9700 does. I could not even play a game properly untill i modded the cooling.

[Overclocker456]

Originally posted by Default
maybe the geforce4 have no cooling problems at stock speed, but what i'm saying is that the radeon 9700 does. I could not even play a game properly untill i modded the cooling.

Is the card built by ATI?? IF so why didn't you RMA it?? How is your case cooling??

[steveyboy]

thats pretty strange you should definatly give them a heads up, so this problem can be ironed out.

[SniperXX]

Well Im just happy that they released it close to when they said it would be released... common NVidia! Alsom I have head ppl talking about the HS not having much pressure.

[GeckoBanzai]

For what its worth: my MSI G4 ti 4200 had thermal paste on the hs/gpu. I replaced it with AS but noticed absolutely no improvement.

[Yodums]

Well it is a fairly fast core so it must produce alot of heat. ATI is very poor when it comes to releasing products, remember when ATI Radeon 8500 was released? The drivers were horrible and causing major conflicts.

No surpise that manufactures use thermal pads because they don't have the time to apply thermal paste for thousands of products a day.

Although you should never rush to buy a newly released video cards..

[dreamtfk]

Lol thanks for telling us 3 times Yodums. :D

[dxiw]

I'm forgetting whther the core is fast or if it produces heat...

Yodums only told us 3 times ... lol

[DaddyB]

ahhh... now i see how Yodums can manage to average 38.26 posts a day :P

[Default]

ok last night i took off the heatsink agian and i found somthing even more disturbing. :( the core of the gpu is actualy prevented from making propour contact with the heatsink by the shim that is place around the outside of the gpu. even with the lapped heatsink and the small amount of thermal past that i put on there it still did not make contact. so i removed the shim :D all it took was a razor blade. now the card runs much cooler. As of right now i'm trying to get a responce from ATi about this and it appears that they now of the problem

[Yodums]

Screw you guys! ;) That was when skip was rebuilding the search index (Stealing all the cycles of the comp), so posting wouldn't load, I pressed it 3 times and it posts 3 times. It was a bug because they were all under a minute and the limit is 1post/1min.

Sorry.

[Deathknight]

The card may run fine for most people with default speeds but I was barely able to increase the memory speed over defaults. It seems to me that at least for memory speeds they release the card at the highest speed that it would be stable at, leaving little room for overclocking without adding heatsinks or some form of active cooling.

[Overclocker456]

Originally posted by Default
ok last night i took off the heatsink agian and i found somthing even more disturbing. :( the core of the gpu is actualy prevented from making propour contact with the heatsink by the shim that is place around the outside of the gpu. even with the lapped heatsink and the small amount of thermal past that i put on there it still did not make contact. so i removed the shim :D all it took was a razor blade. now the card runs much cooler. As of right now i'm trying to get a responce from ATi about this and it appears that they now of the problem

The shim is there to prevent the core from cracking.. do you feel safe with no shim in place?? Remember the athlon core, softer than butter.. and exaclty how did you remove the shim.. thanks

[Default]

i have no worries about the core cracking ;) and i removed the shim with a razor blade. All you have to do is simple slid a razor blade under the corner lift untill that corner is released and then repeat for all sides. Makes all the difference in the world! If you saw my other post i can now do 380/710 100% rock stable :D

[Overclocker456]

What was your max OC before you removed the Shim...?? On the core. I didn't see you overclock the core before you removed the shim.. Also did you use Artic Silver on the core or Alumna??