Something wrong with my X2?

[Viral]

Got my rig up and runnin a couple of days ago with the specs in my sig. Other things to note are case fans, two intake 120mm @ 1200rpm, 4 exhaust @ 1900rpm and 1 @ 1900rpm on thermalright HSF, so plenty of cooling, but I don't have any intake on the side panel as the 200mm cosmos fan didnt clear my HSF.

The problem is with temps of the two GPU's. Can other people with X2's please tell me what they are getting at idle and load because mine are VERY different. It has also has a quiet ticking sound coming from it only when in 3D. I'd assume its the fan.. the sticker on the fan is fine but maybe the higher speed is triggering something? I'm a bit scared of what could happen.

When I first fired my rig up before installing windows the air coming from the back of my X2 was very hot. In windows it got a bit cooler (kind of random what temp it is) but I think this is because it was moving less air so I couldn't feel it as much. Anyway my temps on the first GPU were around 80C, and 42C on the second.... This can't be normal. Anyway I fired up Crysis and after playing for 30 mins and having a temp monitor on in the BG I saw that the temps hardly went up on the first GPU but went up a bit on the second. After that however, the first GPU dropped down to 52C idle. So there was only a 10C delta.

Where I'm at now... well most of the time the first GPU idles around 70-78C while the second is usually 40-48C. The first creeps up to the 80's when playing Crysis but the second GPU gets nowhere near that.

Also, on performance, I'm getting between 15-30 FPS in crysis DX10 Very High 1770x1000 (can't get 1080P in the menu havent bothered adding a custom res yet - I'm using my HDTV for now). It's not really playable..... I thought it might just be a CPU bottleneck but the first stage of my CPU overclocking to 3.4GHz hasn't seemed to help at all. I'm using Cat 8.9beta's and have had CatCrontrolCenter crash on windows startup a few times...? Also, now Crysis has corrupt images for the intro movies and menu (just the scrolling map part doesnt scroll properly), the game is fine except for white dots when you look at the floor in some buildings and very thin lines through some walls. This only happened on my last play through.

X2 owners please give me your feedback and opinions I'm not having the best first impressions here, but I am sure something's wrong.

[clerick]

The idle temp of 80c is caused by a powerplay bug that is not fixed so far. You have to go ingame and then exit out for it to reset. Personally I changed my fan speed ifle from 27 to 32 (no noise increase) and my idle is bout 55c now instead of 70+. Ingame I use a fan speed of 44% and my temps for both cores never go higher then 75. Crysis is just poorly coded so don't expect much (even from hd4870x2). However Crysis Warhead is coming out today/tomorrow and from all the reviews looks SUPERB (better then crysis) and runs MILES better then the original ever did (they finally optimized it properly).

I would recommend doing the fan hack and turning on a profile to increase fan speed when you go ingame.

The white dots is also a bug in the current beta drivers and it is nothing wrong with your card.

I haven't had CCC crash on me on startup so I'm not sure what could be causing that.

As for the noise when it goes ingame you may be hearing the capacitor electrical noise that is prevalent on a lot of cards (although not all) that you hear when the FPS exceeds a certain limit.

[Viral]

I think something was wrong with my catalyst install, just reformatting now as I've had problems with the RAID drivers. Good to know the rest is normal. FWIW idle temps seemed to drop to around 55-60 on the first GPU without any fan hacks right from booting into windows... hope things stay like that!

The noise sounds more like a quiet (easily audible if youre within 2-3ft of the case) ticking to me, it does change in how loud it is, but I can't seem to find out what makes it change. Only seems to happen in 3D mode, tried windowed furmark before and it didnt seem to happen... strange. Either way I'm now pretty sure the card is fine, just a driver install problem.

Thanks for the help.

[sproket]

With Driver v8.9 I am also experiencing this issue of the high temps (87c) at bootup before any 3D has been run.

After running any game in fullscreen mode (windowed doesn't do the trick) the idle temps will drop to 63c.

At load with Age of Conan (pretty intensive game graphically) I get right around 91c. This seems high to me, and I'm not sure if I should modify the fan speed or not.

An ATI rep told me earlier today that 91c seemed really high, probably a defective card. And a VisionTek rep told me that I shouldn't worry unless my temps reached 95c-100c. Some conflicting info there.

I have played with fan speeds of 35% and 40% which will drop the GPU temps considerably, but am not sure if this is necessary or not? I don't want to put uncessary wear on the fan.

I have ton's of case cooling in the Antec900 case I'm using. Also setting the fans to low or high in the case seem to have no impact on the GPU temps at all. Probably because overall no matter what speed the case fans are, the air coming through the case is very cool. The heat seems isolated to the GPU. In that respect the 4870x2 is doing a good job of simply jetting heat out the back without raising the case temp very much at all.

Any reccomendations?

My Specs:
VisionTek ATI 4870 HD X2 (8.9 driver)
EVGA nForce 790i Mobo (BIOS and Drivers up-to-date)
4GB DDR3
Vista Ultimate 32-Bit
Intel Q9550 2.83 - Quad Core
Antec900 Case with all fans on Medium
Dual Monitors

[capsad]

Same error here on a Sapphire 4870x2. Really annoying. I hope they fix that soon. But how can it be that ATI knows about this bug since Catalyst 8.8 and they did not manage to fix it?! Really bad. Normally I like ATI very much but there seems to be some truth in all those prejudices about the ATI drivers.
Capsad

[Viral]

The hotter core (one furtherest from the fan) runs at 3D core speeds until exiting a 3D app, you'd think this would be an easy fix, why didn't ATI fix it with 8.9?

I'm still having problems with Crysis crashing and generally performing quite poor. Going to try some other games tonight.

[Chodi]

Originally Posted by Viral

The hotter core (one furtherest from the fan) runs at 3D core speeds until exiting a 3D app, you'd think this would be an easy fix, why didn't ATI fix it with 8.9?

I'm still having problems with Crysis crashing and generally performing quite poor. Going to try some other games tonight.

When I installed 8.9 with my X2 I had this bug for the first time. I was ready to revert back to 8.7 but I thought of trying something first. I realized when I installed 8.9 it picked up my old modified profiles. I deleted those and redid my desktop and game profiles and the problem went away. I think the old profiles may not be compatable with the new driver. Anyway. it worked for me. I do have a new problem I have seen re[prted on the forum. It is showing my gpu at 251%. Does not effect performance so I am just ignoring it.