Radeon 4670 Fan freaking out

AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut?Meechigan Icrontian
edited October 2009 in Hardware
I recently picked up a Radeon HD 4670 and it's been doing fantastically for me. 140fps at 1080p in some games without even the smallest hiccups.

Recently, the cooling fan on the card has been kind of freaking out. Now and then, it will decide to pulse up to 100% for no apparent reason. It will do this about 40 times per minute, and then just quit for no reason again.

In CCC, I see that the load is sitting at 0%, temp is 38C (Everest also reports the same temp), but the fan will alternate between 38% and 100% even at these low temps and loads.

Updated to the latest CCC this morning to no effect.

Moved everything this weekend to a new Antec 1200 with cooling in the side panel directly aimed at the card. Ambient case temps are sitting sub 30C. Yet the fan continually keeps bouncing up to 100%. Set stock clock-speeds and even tried auto-tune in CCC with the same result. Randomly spiking up for no apparent reason.

Card is a Diamond 4670 with 1GB GDDR3 purchased this summer, been installed for about 10-12 weeks now.

Comments

  • miragemirage
    edited October 2009
    If you check the GPU temperature with GPU-Z (or some other program, RivaTuner, Atitraytools, etc) do you also see temperature spikes at the times fan accelerate?
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    I'll have to check that, but after the last auto-tune run in CCC it has stopped doing it entirely.
  • miragemirage
    edited October 2009
    okay then. If it is not broken now, let's not fix it :)
  • Cliff_ForsterCliff_Forster Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    AlexDeGruven wrote:
    I recently picked up a Radeon HD 4670 and it's been doing fantastically for me. 140fps at 1080p in some games without even the smallest hiccups.

    Recently, the cooling fan on the card has been kind of freaking out. Now and then, it will decide to pulse up to 100% for no apparent reason. It will do this about 40 times per minute, and then just quit for no reason again.

    In CCC, I see that the load is sitting at 0%, temp is 38C (Everest also reports the same temp), but the fan will alternate between 38% and 100% even at these low temps and loads.

    Updated to the latest CCC this morning to no effect.

    Moved everything this weekend to a new Antec 1200 with cooling in the side panel directly aimed at the card. Ambient case temps are sitting sub 30C. Yet the fan continually keeps bouncing up to 100%. Set stock clock-speeds and even tried auto-tune in CCC with the same result. Randomly spiking up for no apparent reason.

    Card is a Diamond 4670 with 1GB GDDR3 purchased this summer, been installed for about 10-12 weeks now.

    Look familiar? If so, let me go on record as saying that cooler officialy sucks. Its loud and ineffective. If thats the cooler your rockin, I would swap it for an video card cooler. Don't need anything too fancy, a decent Zalman cooler will do wonders on it, but if you have that stock cooler with that paddle fan and those itty bitty aluminum fins, its just a crappy cooler for the card provided.
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    That looks like the card I got, and I'm sure that's what's making the noise, I'm just weirded out by why it keeps spiking randomly when the temperature diode is reading perfectly normal temps. It seems though, that it only does it now and then, and doesn't persist too long, so I'll leave it for now.

    If it gets to annoying me too bad, I'll start looking at a higher-level GPU cooler.
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Definitely the card I got.

    I was thinking about picking up this cooler. It doesn't say it's rated for the 4670, but I can't imagine mine generates more heat than an nVidia 9800 would.

    http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0281555
  • miragemirage
    edited October 2009
    AlexDeGruven wrote:
    Definitely the card I got.

    I was thinking about picking up this cooler. It doesn't say it's rated for the 4670, but I can't imagine mine generates more heat than an nVidia 9800 would.

    http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0281555

    That cooler is excellent. It is cooling my voltmod HD4850@850, it can cool your HD 4670 easily. I doubt you will need it but you can strap 120/80 mm fans on it using zip/twist ties as well. But make sure it is compatible with your card since it is a little big.
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Finally nailed down the cause, at least. Seems that Everest, whatever it does to query the GPU information, is causing the GPU fan to go nuts when it's running. As soon as I start Everest, it starts going crazy. The instant I stop it, things go back to normal.

    Still going to put a 3rd party, probably fanless, cooler on there some day. Just not an urgent need.
  • miragemirage
    edited October 2009
    That is interesting and good to know. Get rid of that Everest now :)
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Heh, funny thing is, I use it to get my fan speeds because SpeedFan never likes to get all of them for me. Even now, I was only using it to tune up my OC setup to make sure I was getting a good balance of speed and fan noise.
  • miragemirage
    edited October 2009
    Did you try GPU-Z?
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    I hadn't yet. But I don't use Everest to get GPU fan speeds, just the speeds of everything running off of my MoBo.

    Fired it up, and the card behaves normally.
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