Question about Video Card.

[Void]

So up till now i have avoided my ATI catalyst control center. Well it being tuesday and my day off and all i get into all sorts of trouble on the net. Anyway rambling aside i noticed i can turn my graphics fan on manual or leave it on ?auto?. Anyway on this so called "auto" it says the temp is 67 deg. now i set fan to manual and 35% speed brought it down to 39 deg. Should i leave it on man or is 67+ deg an ok thing i really dont know about this stuff heh. any input would be good

[burningforce]

from what i hear, auto setting does a poor job at automatically adjusting the fan speed when the card gets very hot. I usually leave my fan on 50% on my nvidia card using evga precision. If you can stand the noise, then leave it on manual and adjust it to what you want. I am sure there are programs that can do a better job at adjusting the fan speed for you, I do not know of any ati ones atm.

TLDR: leave it manual and adjust the fan higher when you game and lower when not gaming

[Void]

Awesome thanks for responce. Never knew i could turn it on manual till today i cant imagine how hot its gotten before.

[Ualaa]

Auto will have the fan turn on, when the software decides it is running too hot.

If you don't mind the sound of the fan, having it on always will cool the card.
I cannot imagine running cooler as something which will cause problems.
The only caveat, if you force it to run at 35% and the card heats to the point where the fan should run faster, that might not be for the best.

A lot of the ATI cards run at much higher temperatures.. then just about any other card I've had. Checking their site, my 4870X2 is supposed to run at 70c and is not overheating at 90c, which sounds absurdly hot to me.

Downgraded to a GTX 275, to test if the ATI card was causing my freezing of random slave clients. In over a week with the new card (which runs wow smoothly at slightly higher settings), I have not had a single slave freeze. Maybe my ATI was defective, or perhaps it should have been cooled more (I had the fans on automatic).

[-silencer-]

This is why I bought the Sapphire Vapor-X version of the 5870. It uses a different fan/heatsink design that keeps the GPU very cool. I'll be throwing a full-size waterblock on it soon, but for about $10 over stock, this card/cooler was perfect and well worth it, especially if you care about noise too!