6870 running a bit hot?

I just got my 6870 on wednesday and can provide you with what I have experienced. I have played L4D2, BC2, and fallout: new vegas with this new card. All games I have upped to highest settings with 1080p resolution. Unfortunately, I do not capture my FPS, but they are all running very smooth for me thus far.

I run two monitors, but only game on the main display. I had CCC opened on my second montior on the first day and I never noticed temperatures climb above 60c (57-59 mostly). I just let the card set its own fan speed and I have not heard it once while my headphones are on.

I am not 100% sure how accurate this is because I have had troubles upgrading my CCC to latest version since like 10.3 or so. I always get an error on Win7 x64 telling me, "this program did not install correctly." I usually spend 5 minutes or so looking for an answer before giving up and simply installing video drivers only.

edit: forgot to add that I am running w/o overclock yet!

You are overclocking the card to it's extreme limit, so the extra heat and noise are to be expected. That 980mhz overclock you got is higher than I have seen the card taken in reviews without applying extra voltage.

Hardwarecanuks.com did a great article on it:
"We’ll start with the obvious: overclocking increases heat output and overclocking with higher than reference voltage impacts thermals even more. Unfortunately, without a custom cooler the HD 6870 gains heat at an almost alarming pace and believe it or not, the vapour chamber-totting XFX HD 6850 isn’t that far behind. If you are thinking of going for high clock frequencies with a HD 6800 series product, we highly recommend you look into upgrading the heatsink or at least buying a product with a higher end thermal solution."
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-r...