Radeon hd 5870 dots on the screen

Additionally, this only happens while actually playing the game. Not with game menus, or windows or playing movies.

download and use HW monitor, play a game and find out what the max temp your GPU hits is, artifacts are often caused by overheating.

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Hey thanks for replying. i downloaded HW monitor and after playing for like 5 minutes, the max temperature reached by the video card was 64 degrees celcius. i'm not sure if that's too hot. it idles at about 43. thanks

actually i continued playing and since i posted the last message the max has been 74 degrees. i can increase the fan speed but it'll be really loud. before i do that, are these temps normal for this card?

thanks again

Anything below 85 is fine, 85+ is a bit hot, and the 5870 will throttle at 100C. You said that the issue doesnt normally occur until you have played for an hour, so leave HW monitor running in the background and play like your normally do, if you get the funny dots then check the max that HW monitor has read, it will generally take a while for the temps in a system to stabilize at their max value so play normally and if you get the same issue you will have a log of the temps.

Thank you very much for your help. I'll try what you sugested. If the problem is overheating, do you think this means the card is defective? The fan speed is at 22% by default. When I increase it to 50% temperatures go down significantly while playing the game. But it's so loud that I can hear it even with loud gunfire from the game.

The fan should increase if the temperatures of the GPU high. Typically near 70C the fan might be up near 30% with the default settings.

75C is normal.

bystander - you are correct. when it's set to auto, the speed will adjust. i learned the reason i didn't hear it any louder when playing games is because the card doesn't over heat. I played last night until the artifacts came back and the max temp HWmonitor recorded was 74 degrees and based on hunter315's post, that is a normal temperature. Could it be too much voltage from overclocking the processor; although i didn't mess with the pci voltage.

So I called XFX tech support and they advised to lower the clocks to the stock speeds of a regular 5870. Mycard is the XXX model which comes overclocked from the factory to 900 core and 1300 memory. The regular card is 850 core and 1200 memory. I changed it and no more artifacts after playing for several hours. This is quite dissappointing since I paid about $30 more for the "XXX" label. The card still performs amazingly. It's just frustrating that it cannot perform at the speeds at which the manufacturer promised it would. I could RMA but after reading many posts about this specific card, i have a feeling there is a good chance the next one will have the same problem or worse. If anyone reads this, you would probably be better off buying the regular XFX hd 5870 or a 5870 from a different manufacturer. They are more available now.

Wow, its unfortunate that the GPU cant even sustain slightly elevated clock rates, they are probably saving the ones with good OC potential for the 5970. Realize though that XFX gets no say in the chip, and that if all of their slightly OC'ed cards have that problem, then likely all 5870s have a similar issue as all of the chips are made at the same foundry and there is no difference between brands. Hopefully that gets fixed in a revision soon, that is quite disappointing.

Best answer selected by Solutionmaster.