SOLVED Weird 5970 issue.

Hey all, I recently bought a 5970 and am loving it, I am getting excellent performance and it has really delivered on my expectations. However, I have a really wierd issue with this card. Anytime my gpu goes below 50'c it freezes to a white/grey screen with bars. I contacted XFX support and I was told idle temps above 50'c are okay

What gives? Is this a know issue?

Specs in sig.

i had xfx and had a duct from outside to fan so was sucking -1 air through temp while running vantage 22c and ran fine

dont think youre card should be freezing at what i would think is not a low temp 50c try different driver first re test it ...if it freezes with all games and benches i would think its the card or you have overclocked it to far and need to lower the clock

pwnmachine said:

Hey all, I recently bought a 5970 and am loving it, I am getting excellent performance and it has really delivered on my expectations. However, I have a really wierd issue with this card. Anytime my gpu goes below 50'c it freezes to a white/grey screen with bars. I contacted XFX support and I was told idle temps above 50'c are okay

What gives? Is this a know issue?

Specs in sig.

Click to expand...

Here is a wild guess. The fan speed is determined by the temperature of the GPUs. But due to a design flaw in the cooler it is not the GPUs that are in risk of overheating but the VRMs. So here is what I think is happening: When the GPU temperatures drop below 50C the fan slows down. But then the fan is too slow for the VRMs, which in turn end up overheating. And when the VRMs overheat you get all kinds of weird looking graphical errors and freezes.

Two things you can do: Use GPU-Z to see what the actual temperatures of the VRMs are. Change the fan speed controler in CCC to manual and full speed, and see if the problem persists.

(You must have 5970 BIOS version 1.1 to be able to use manual fan controll)

Yeh i had a waterblock and my temps didn't go above 50 degrees ever and I never had this problem... keep the fan cranked all the time regardless of GPU temp and see if it is the VRM's that are overheating

Sorry let me clarify, my card works flawlessly in games performs with nearly 100% scaling. Its just during 2D mode or watching videos, if I run my temps above 50'c and work in 2D mode the computer can go days without crashing. Also for my fan control I use Afterburner, the card never goes above 70'c under full load.

I have tried 10.6, 10.4,10.9 and 11.2.

Edit: I am also not running my physx card nor do I have any Nvidia drivers on my machine, except for my mobo(could this be the issue?).

Alright so I tried what you guys said and cranked up the fan to 90%, when I set the fan speed my temp was 60'c as soon as my temps hit 48'c I got black screen then crash(had to press power button). I am fed up with this problem, I dont want to run my card at +50'c all the time. I am running out of ideas.

As I said before I can play games for hours without any issues. Also I have not overclocked, but I did before and I had no issues in games and the temps were fine.

What gives?

im at a losss sorry

My two 5970's run between 60 and 75 C all the time. Anything in the 50's is just fine.

UPDATE:

So looks like the final solution to this problems was flashing the bios to a different version. I used the pre-overclocked 800/1100 bios from Sapphire, a guide can be found here. It has worked for me flawlessly and have yet to experience any issues.

Bios flash was my last resort and hey it worked!! Now my gpu idles at close to 35'c with no crashing or lock ups in 2D mode, I didn't even have to alter stock 2D clocks.

Thanks for all your replies. Thread solved!