Reference HD 7950 3GB acting wonky during sleep mode

Evelon277

So I've had a Powercolor HD7950 (reference design) for about 6 months now I think, and ever since I got it I've had this problem. When my computer goes to sleep, sometimes right away and sometimes after hours of sleeping, the graphics card fan starts to randomly go to 100% for a second, then go back to idle, up to 100%, back to idle repeatedly until I turn the monitor on. I've tried googling the issue but I've only found people reporting the same problem; nobody solving it. I honestly don't know what to do for this, and I'm hoping one of you might.

PirateNinja

I did find this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/349900-33-7950-spins-idle

The just of it is that you have to disable "turn off monitor" in your power saving plan settings. Not ideal, but that's the only thing that seemed to consistently work for people in that thread.

Thrax

What driver?

Evelon277

I saw that too, PirateNinja, but I was hoping there'd be a different fix.
Drivers are the latest, 13.2.

Thrax

It's very likely that there's something going on in the background that's keeping the GPU awake and preventing it from entering the AMD ZeroCore Power state (GPU off, except for trickle current to the PCI Express controller).

PirateNinja

Maybe setup some gpu logging service, let this happen, and open the log up to see if it was a program using the gpu which caused the fan to spin up.
Maybe GPU-z has the functionality, I'm not sure. But then you could identify what program if any is causing it to happen and try to tweak it.

PirateNinja

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

Good for logging resource usage.

Evelon277

I made it so my monitor doesn't turn off after any amount of time and I haven't heard it do what I explained since, so I'm fine with this fix. Thanks guys.