Artifacting, Freezes, AtiTool 1950xt

Over the past week or so I've started seeing some minor artifacting while playing cod4. I cleaned out my fans, made sure they appeared to be working alright and continued playing.

A few days later I froze a couple times, where the computer would just reboot in the middle of the game.

After this happened several times, I downloaded atitool to jack up my fan speed. It was doing around 30% at 85 or so, so I maxed it at 100%. The temp went way down of course.

But, the crashing got worse. From that point, i wasn't getting artifacts, but I'd be playing maybe 5 minutes and the computer would just lock up (not rebooting like it was before), and I'd have to manually power off and reboot.


I believe I have atitool only adjusting the fan speed, but i might be assuming something there. I thought running the fan at 100% wouldn't cause any problems like I'm experiencing, but when I turned off atitool, the crashing stopped. I would start getting minor artifacts again.. and I believe I'd probably start crashing again as well (from overheating it appears).

Has anyone else had a problem like this with atitool, and what is a good fan setting? I believe the fans are working properly, as jacking it up does lower the temp just fine.. but apparently my system doesn't like the fan going on 100%. Any suggestions on what I should do here? My whole system is about 9 months old, including the card.