x1950 Pro overheated in 5 minutes, solved!

[Marty502]

Check the last post!

---

Hey everyone, I'm trying to sell my old card, but this is just not right. I just can't sell a card that behaves likes this.

It's a Sapphire x1950 Pro with the stock cooler.

You see, this card used to peak around 82-83ºC and everything was OK. But realizing this still wasn't good enough, a few months ago I took the heatsink off, cleaned the original thermal compound on the GPU and put a thin layer of AS5 on the chip with the credit card method. I thought it would be better! But simply put, it hasn't.

Now I can't even use this card for more than 10 minutes in anything, or it locks up. With the ATi Tray Tools 3D Bench, the temperature rockets to over 90ºC in a few minutes. The heatsink has been vaccumed and it's clean inside, and I have a pretty aggressive fan setting on it. But nothing seems to work; I've reseated the heatsink like 5 times, and applied AS5 with different methods. It just doesn't matter. I mean for God's sake, right now it's idling at 60ºC! You wouldn't believe how angry I am right now.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be going wrong? I'm desperate, and I don't wanna throw this lemon to another poor soul on the used market.

Thanks in advance.

 

[nemesismk2]

I think there might be something wrong with your Sapphire Radeon x1950 Pro because mine is using the stock cooler and it's running at 47c and the fan speed is at 41%.

 

[hooflung]

I have had two 3850's and a X1900GT that do this too. I get Video Signal not found errors when I play a shader intensive game such as EVE-Online. The fan will shoot to 100%. The fan is always set to 85%. There has got to be some reasonable explination for this. Either Newegg sent me back the same video card, which I doubt, or Saphire had a bad batch. I am 2 steps away from ripping out an 8800GS out of my SLI rig and saving up for a HD4870 from Visiontek. Saphire is dead to me. I've replaced mobo and psu as well as done some cooling mods. Nothing seems to work =/

 

[Quiksilver]

Oil the fan bearings and re-apply something else other than AS5.

 

[dakels]

Originally posted by: Quiksilver
Oil the fan bearings and re-apply something else other than AS5.

He did it 5 times... AS 5 is fine unless he has some single weird batch which is highly unlikely. I doubt that is the problem and as long as the fan is spinning visibly ok, it's probably ok there too as even a slow working fan should keep that card under 80C at idle... Something is wrong.

My X1950 pro never went over 65C at load and sub 50C idle.

 

[Marty502]

I went to the Sapphire forums and quickly found a likely culprit: A small PSU.

I use a ThermalTake TR2 430W which is well below the minimum 30A recommended on the 12V rail. Mine is rated at 18A, but actually does 16A. And they say, having a too small PSU usually ramps up the heat on video cards. I normally wouldn't believe it but see it for yourself:

http://forums.sapphiretech.com/showthread.php?t=15180

And with a x1950 Pro too, no less.

I have some spare cash, so past tomorrow I'll buy a new, more powerful PSU and will let you guys knows how it goes. Who knows? Even my CPU temps might drop a bit, and they've always been on the high side a bit...

 

[shangshang]

So if PSU was the issue, then how come you weren't getting the overheating issue before? I don't buy it.

 

[Marty502]

Because before, my computer was a bit "smaller" perhaps. Only two sticks of memory, and a single core A64. Also, I didn't have the X-Fi sound card. Maybe that's it?

We'll see what happens. If it doesn't help, then I'll still have a good PSU on my hands. Which is something I should have done before anyway. Plus I've had some mysterious lockups with the 3870 anyway.

 

[shangshang]

let us know how it goes. I'm curiuos about it myself.

 

[dakels]

I find that really odd. I used to run:

P4 3.2ghz HT/800fsb
4x 512 HyperX DDR400
2x 74gb Raptors
1 DVDRW
SB Audigy 2 PCI
X1950 Pro

All on... a 250w-300w Dell PSU

It used to be on a Gigabyte 8KNXP and 440 watt thermaltake truepower but that MB got a short so I had to use an old Dell dimension 4600. I think I got really lucky with a extraordinary PSU.

I would think that if the power was too weak that you would get crashes, shutdowns, instead of heating up? Never heard that before but I don't know much about that. I'd also think a 440w PSU would handle a x1950 with ease.

 

[Marty502]

I just bought a new PSU, a Thermaltake PurePower RX 600W. It's replacing my old ThermalTake TR2 430W. And surprise surprise! Now the load temp is steady around 80ºC, which is not that bad for a x1950 Pro. Before it rocketed up to 95ºC before I just shut the torture test in ATT off, because it kept going up!

And with the old PSU the GPU idled at 60ºC. Right now it's doing 48ºC. And these aren't really good temperatures for a x1950 Pro, but now it's fine and actually usable! So it means I can sell it. Thanks everyone!

So here's a tip: Don't overlook the PSU. At least for me, getting a good PSU dropped my GPU temps a lot.

EDIT: Even my CPU temps dropped a good chunk, idle went from 35ºC to around 28ºC, and load dropped around 5ºC too... however that probably due to the fat-ass fan on the new PSU sitting on top of the HSF.