ASUS 6970 OC - Insane temps?

[Infrantic]

Hey,
I've been wanting to overclock my ASUS 6970 DirectCU II.
My idle temps are around 50-60°C which I think are a bit high.
I've overclocked the card using AMD Overdrive setting the Core clock to 920MHz and Memory clock to 1425MHz so far.
So I run Furmark and 3dmark11 to test for stability, but every time I run them the card rockets to 93-95°C. Here's a GPU-Z shot:

The GPU Temp #2 is even showing a max of 100°C! Can this be right? I noticed the temps earlier playing a game, being around and above 90°C as well!

 

[lozz08]

Is the card's fan being blocked by another pci card
Have you reapplied thermal paste to the heatsink
have you manually set fan speed

 

[mindistortionz]

what kind of case do you have? might not be getting enough airflow to the card. your idle temps seem high to me as well

 

[Infrantic]

The card is the only PCI unit connected, so there's nothing blocking the fans.
I haven't messed with the card in any way.
The fan speed it set to automatic and as you can see on the GPU-Z screenshot, it ramps up to ~2300RPM when the temperature rises.

I have a brand new Antec P193 V3 case, it has a 200mm fan blowing air from the outside directly at the Motherboard and the graphics card. I've run all cables through the back panel, so there are no cables blocking any airflow in the entire case. As far as I know, the airflow should be pretty damn good.

 

[elricthefullmetal]

Shouldn't the fan be blowing air other way around for it to work correctly?

 

[mindistortionz]

yeah most top fans blow air up out if the case. I know my antec 902 is set that way. heat will rise and that fan should blow it out, not stir it all around your case. my 2 cents.

 

[Infrantic]

Can't really argue with the way Antec thought out the case.. There are two 140mm fans in the top blowing the hot air out of the case.

 

[ZWingerRyRy]

I have the same card. Heres a snapshot for comparison. Also one thing DO NOT USE FURMARK. Thats a very unrealistic bench, there is no game that will ever push your card that far. I run every game max settings with only 50% fan and never go above 60 degrees with a overclock. Heaven Bench and 3dmark11 will net me 1-2 degrees over 60 with a overclock. Furmark will blast my *** upto 80s on stock clock.
In the shot as you can see overclocked looping Heaven DirectX11 Benchmark.

Id say something it wrong with your card. Make sure the cooler is making contact with the gpu as the card is heavy and tends to boe. Also make sure nothing is infront of the fans of the card or youll be taking heat right back into the card.

 

[trihedral]

Anything over 90C is tooooo hot.

To be honest, i wouldn't want to hit 80C let alone go past it.

Check if there is sufficient space between the cards, if not, get something rubber to open a gap.

Then you can put a 200mm fan above the GPU's which should lower the temperature more. If you want to go all out, lap the heatsink with sandpaper the replace the original thermal paste with diamond thermal compound or something along the lines of high end thermal paste.

 

[KaylaF]

My single ASUS 6970 card runs at 75 - 85 Celsius at all times. I have used this card on 2 systems and both saw under-performance. I always ran hot no matter what system it was on. I do not OC. I can get it down to 72 if I manually run the fan at 90%+. Sounds like I am sitting next to a wind tunnel though. Installing ASUS utilities like Smart Doctor crashes the ASUS card. I only can load the catalyst program directly from ATI. If I load catalyst from ASUS.com, big problems happen. This card was stabler on my old system and I would score 21,000 on Vantage. Low, real low. All drivers and Catalyst are up to date, use same driver as on old system. Playing Skyrim or 3D Vantage on the new MOBO will push it to 103C easy. Fans throttle up and down like it is having a heart attack. So I don't play games on my new gaming rig, just normal work. I have it on a GIGABYTE z68 chipset with an i7 2600k and 16GB of RAM. I have Virtu installed as well but it makes no difference on or off. My 3D Vantage score is currently 15,000 when the test does not fail. I have a GTX 260 now on the old i7 920 (original store bought setup) that scores 17,000. I did RMA the first card and am on the second card with the same problems. Any ideas?