A little gotcha in the Catalyst Control Centre

[mikeymikec]

I'm fairly sure I'm running the 11.1 drivers. As my graphics card (ATI HD 5770)'s fan is rather noisy on the default setting, I took a suggestion from another forum to use the CCC to enable manual fan control, which worked reasonably well.

However, it has a disadvantage. In the process of enabling it, one must enable 'AMD OverDrive'. If you do this, the graphics card will be clocked at a higher speed when idle. Or at least, it does on mine (it says it at the bottom of that window, and I'm using CPU-Z's graphics tab as a second source of information).

My graphics card can idle as low as 150MHz (core) / 300MHz (memory)
With using AMD OverDrive it only goes as low as 400MHz/1200MHz.

Which is obviously bad from a wasted energy / extra heat output point of view.

At the moment I'm using Gigabyte's "Easy Boost" program instead (which I've installed after spotting this problem), which seems to implement fan control in exactly the same way except it doesn't have this idling problem, which is a bit strange.

 

[pandemonium]

MSI's Afterburner is quite honestly the best aftermarket software available to mess with fan speeds. It now does a plethora of other useful things as well, including on-screen-display for any GPU statistic, screen capture, video capture, manual fan control, frequency adjustment, voltage adjustment (if available for your chipset), etc...

I had the same problem using CCC with the downclocking not working properly at idle if you set a higher overclock frequency. I think ATI/AMD need to just give up developing it and solely concentrate on their drivers; honestly.

Just make sure your temps aren't drastically increasing for the sake of your hearing pleasure.

 

[mikeymikec]

I think ATI/AMD need to just give up developing it and solely concentrate on their drivers; honestly.

I think this is true of so many companies, in one way or another. With Microsoft, try getting event viewer to consult MS's online help for a particular error. 99% of the time (for me anyway), the result is "we don't have any further information about this error". MS's online help has been dreadful from the point that Win2k was released, IMO. It really annoys me that Microsoft come up with these error codes, then they provide no useful documentation for them.

Just make sure your temps aren't drastically increasing for the sake of your hearing pleasure.

Yeah, I've been checking it from time to time after gaming. Admittedly that was with the idle speeds set too high by CCC, so it should be better than that now

Just checked it, 40C GPU, both Gigabyte's tool and CCC say that.

I assume MSI's AfterBurner doesn't work on non-MSI cards, or does it?

 

[(sic)Klown12]

I assume MSI's AfterBurner doesn't work on non-MSI cards, or does it?

The overclocking and fan control work on all cards, but voltage control will depend on whether or not the card was proper hardware for it to interface with. That usually only happens on non-reference, non-MSI cards, but reference designs from any company is usually good to go.

 

[Phynaz]

The overclocking and fan control work on all cards, but voltage control will depend on whether or not the card was proper hardware for it to interface with. That usually only happens on non-reference, non-MSI cards, but reference designs from any company is usually good to go.

Voltage control does not function on reference design 5770's.

 

[mikeymikec]

Gigabyte's Easy Boost app doesn't increase the fan speed under load at all, so I have to remember to disable it before playing a game. Would MSI AfterBurner do better?

 

[mikeymikec]

Thanks, MSI AfterBurner does exactly what I need (being able to set my own fan control settings depending on core temp).