My stock x850 seems to be overheating .. need help

Hi,
I bought a radeon x850 (PCI-E version) off ebay about a month ago (risky I know). My problem is that the bugger seems to be overheating badly, while playing on WoW the temperature rose to 64 degrees celcius and it produces a very high pitched noise (the kind that would make a dog whimper). Of course, this has give me cause for concern. Since I have bought I off ebay I know that the chances of getting an RMA are pretty much none. So I was wondering what cooling solutions you would all recommend that could take on such a problem (minus water...I'm not THAT loaded). I get the feeling that the fan is faulty as when it boot up it starts off spinning very high for around 2 seconds and then slows down quickly (i can judge this from the noise it makes). I feel that as the temperature increases, so should the fan speed, as is ATI's claim.

Your help would be most appreciated.

 

Are you getting any graphical anomilies or glitches? The fan could be dirty, or perhaps something is rubbing. Other than that, replacing the fan can be a PITA.

I NEVER buy anything from EBAY, for these exact reasons.

 

I'm not getting any artifacts or anything but the temperature is worrying me along with the noise. I knew it was a risk to buy something from ebay and to that I hold up my hands. As far as I can see, everything seems to be clean, I might take the cooler off and have a bit of an inspection tomorrow and if needs be apply some good thermal paste. I just get the gut feeling that this isnt the problem and its something to do with the fan speed, it should be controlling itself but its not, its like its constantly running at idle.

 

Don't FORCE the cooler off.

Also, when running games that use heavy graphics (high res, and lots of eye candy turned on) will cause a load on the GPU, raising temps, WHICH IS NORMAL!

If you start seeing artifacts, then a heat issue usually starts. Unless there are some game patches that need to be installed, or updated video drivers need to be installed.....

 

Well. I just toyed around with the detail settings in WoW, with everything turned down the temp reading was idle at 56 degrees C. As soon as i put even one setting higher it would go 60+. This is definately not normal. The settings in the catalyst centre are set to 'let the application decide' so the catalyst centre isn't overriding anything. Seems like im gonna have to get a new cooler unless I inspect it tomorrow and find an obvious flaw. What does anyone make of this http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer/product.php?productid=18459 Would seem easy to fit too since the heatsink and fan is currently held on with screws on the backplate

 

In addition to my last post I updated the drivers from 5.7 to 5.8 and found no difference. WoW automatically updates patches so there is no issue with that

 

I'm still not sure that those temps are really out of line. GPU's generally have higher tolerances that the average CPU. I have a 6600GT (not a monster heat producer) and it idled in the low 50s with the stock heatsink and ran perfectly fine. I however now have this: http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer/product.php?productid=18263 which in my opinion is the best option out there. Oh... and the noise.. I've heard that before. I bought a refurbished X300 as a backup and it squeals like that, but only when overclocked. I honestly don't know the cause

 

Well I've had the HSF off for a quick look. Can't see any issues with dirt or anything. The amount of thermal paste on the gpu seemed ok, seemed a little thin to me and sporadic so ive spread it out a little. Once i put the thing back together i held it horizontally to the light and it seems that the heatsink is in contact with the GPU core. All this being said I'm still getting temps in the 60's. Hmmm. I guess this might be normal, I just hope its not damaging my card in any way, these things are expensive. Also, the high pitched noise that it makes when it gets hot can be quite annoying so I might invest in a third party cooler to hopefully drop the temperatures.

 

grab a can of compressed air and use it to clean the fan, see if that helps

 

well my NVDIA GeForce 5900 se/xt when i run 3Dmark05 get's to 86° celcius and the core slowdown threshold was 120° Celcius, but when i downloaded the 77.77 driver the core slowdown threshold went up to 140° Celcius. yes it's celcius and everest says the same. someone said that the card fails before it reaches that temperature (THEN WHY THE HECK IT SAYS NOTIFY WHEN GPU CORE TEMPERTATURE EXCEEDS THRESHOLD) in the properties setting advanced in the desktop everest reports the same temperature (also everest doesn't report my cpu temperature) anyone knows why???

 

dude, what's your question?

 

When i said all that i wanted to respond melancholiclaughter question and also i wanted to ask why my gpu threshold went up and if the card fails before it reaches 140° celcius (which is the threshold)

 

trying put more intake fan (side fan) near your VGA card it blow in VGa is better.

 

Spent a couple of hours doing some research on the X850XT and GPU cores in general. It seems that the X850XT PE at stock speeds with the stock cooler under full load heats to around 90 deg C. So it seems that these kind of temperatures are considered normal. They must make GPU's more tolerant to heat which begs the question that why cant they apply this technology to CPU's?? Think of the overclocking potential.

Thanks for all the help everyone

 

No offense meant, but it's alot more understandable when the sentences are well structured.

Probably not, it'd seem to me that NVidia knows their own gpu designs well enough to determine a suitable treshold.
I've not heard of 5900xt/se's dying before the gpu treshold.

 

Well that quite simple, they do different things and as such are designed different.
Another thing that comes into play is that CPUs in general are fairly lenient when it comes to temperatures, if I recall correctly an Athlon64 has a treshold of about 90*C and a PIV's is a tad higher even.
CPU's operate at a lower temperature than GPU's do, generally speaking, which is a good thing, I can already heat my room with my computer