Overheating problem

[m16si]

Hello my friend just bought a new rig:

Intel core2duo 6550

radeon 3870 sapphire (512mb)

4gb of ram DDR2

asus mobo

and so on

Ammm and he's expiriencing overheating with radeon 3870 card (like 90 degress).

Is this beacuse he didn't listen to me and bought a crappy PSU ?

He bought a LCpower 550W PSU. I told him to go with enermax 550w or chieftec 550w or more.

I still didn't exclude the possibility of crappy psu because 3870 requires at least 20amps (i think i hope i didn't get this wrong ) i think his PSU dosen't have enough amps to run his computer and his card struggles with insufficent amps?

What do you think? I think his 3870 card shouldn't heat so much.

Forgot to mention he has a good case with fairly good air flow and that GPU heats only at some specific games (crysis and other hardware greedy games).

Thnx

[puntoMX]

I still didn't exclude the possibility of crappy psu because 3870 requires at least 20amps (i think i hope i didn't get this wrong )

Well, that card doesn’t pull 20A but a 20A 12V line is recommended for the whole system.

What brand is it any way?

[clidx]

the HD3870 reference cooler truly sucks, just look at the reviews. some amd partners have got better ones but still.. they're based from a poorly performing reference design.

i'd just shell out for a 3rd party cooler. you will void the warranty but there's a small chance anything will happen. the accelero s1 rev 2 (and a 120mm fan) is excellent for the price.

[m16si]

The psu is LC POWER 550W !

Thnx

[puntoMX]

I was talking about the VGA card .

[Zxian]

i'd just shell out for a 3rd party cooler. you will void the warranty but there's a small chance anything will happen. the accelero s1 rev 2 (and a 120mm fan) is excellent for the price.

I doubt that he'd even need a fan for the 3850. Your X1950Pro runs much hotter than the new cards, and would require the use of a fan to help the heatsink. AFAIK, there are people out there that use the S1 on their 3850's without a fan.

[m16si]

Graphic card is 3870 sapphire 512mb edition!

Thnx

[puntoMX]

http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/gallery/img...DR4_Card_02.jpg

It’s the one from the link I presume...

Strange indeed, I would say:

- Bad temperature readings (Driver, VGA BIOS)

- Bad attached cooler

I’m sure it’s not your motherboard or PSU, when those are bad you will not even play any game. To tell you the truth, I would not even worry too much about it...

[Zxian]

Even ATI cards will start to show artifacts at over 90C - there definitely is an overheating problem here. The problem could be a lack of airflow in the rest of his case. The graphics card's heatsink and fan may be working properly, but if they have nowhere to expel the heat produced, then you're going to run into problems.

What kind of case does he have? I've seen many high end systems built in cases that simply don't have the airflow capabilities necessary.