The Serpent Rider wrote on Yesterday, 19:09:

G80 cares are definitely not safe with stock coolers, unless fan is ramped up to 100%.

Maybe one day it will die. Then I will have a feel good reason to recycle it. Heh. But the thing sees only about 1 hour of use per year.

Stock coolers and especially - fan control, in combination with bumpgate or even without it, can cause failures too.

Fan control curves on those cards are often completely crazy, as if purpose made to break the card and work in the worst way possible. Like i have powercolor HD3870 which has rather sizeable cooler, but it slows down the fan so much it sits at 70-80C at idle. I mean i can turn the thing on, mess around with BIOS settings or something and given 10-15 minutes when OS boots it'll be at 80C...

Under load it is 90C, and at that points it starts ramping up the fan as if 90C was set as a target.

The cooler is perfectly capable of staying quiet and cooling the card competently. It'll sit at ~45C at inaudible 25% at idle and at 60-70C at 50% under load. Further than that it becomes noisy, but it can also be configured to keep the temperature within 60C without sounding like a hairdryer.

Why the hell they configured it this way? Poor attempt at planned obsolescence? Or sheer incompetence?

And that's not an unique example, many cards from that era are like this. Including GF8. And that's probably a very common reason for failure....

Archer57 wrote on Today, 00:47:

Fan control curves on those cards are often completely crazy, as if purpose made to break the card and work in the worst way possible. Like i have powercolor HD3870 which has rather sizeable cooler, but it slows down the fan so much it sits at 70-80C at idle. I mean i can turn the thing on, mess around with BIOS settings or something and given 10-15 minutes when OS boots it'll be at 80C...

Under load it is 90C, and at that points it starts ramping up the fan as if 90C was set as a target.

This is what I see with a Powercolor 3870 BIOS that Techpowerup has archived. It looks like what you are experiencing. You can dump your BIOS and edit it with RBE if you like.

There are some nice configuration vars there. Maybe you can make a fan setup that isn't irritating.

swaaye wrote on Today, 03:29:

This is what I see with a Powercolor 3870 BIOS that Techpowerup has archived. It looks like what you are experiencing. You can dump your BIOS and edit it with RBE if you like.

There are some nice configuration vars there. Maybe you can make a fan setup that isn't irritating.

Yikes, yep, that would explain it. Can not even imagine why... physically the cooler is reasonable enough, this curve makes it horrible.

May be i indeed should mess around with BIOS, afterburner does a decent job at controlling the fan, but any time it is not loaded the card is cooked to 70-90C which is not nice...