MSI lightning 7970 temps too high?

[krobjack]

Hi guys, Im on the fly at work and wanted to save some time, so I apologize in advance if this topic has already been resolved.

Ive had nothing but problems with my new rig built last march and over the course of the last 6 months, finally got it pinpointed to the gpu. The MSI lightning 7970. I've rma'd it twice. The first two died on me suddenly. The first after 2 months and the second after two days. After the second one died, I asked for a refun to which I was told they do not give out refunds. I was told they do not offer cross shipping either. Skip ahead yet another month and I get my third card yesterday. Card works, Yay!! Now the problem (if it lasts that is) is that after 2 minutes in Battlefield 3, the temps shot up to 85C. The previous two cards never breached 65C. I ran MSI's furmark and it took all of a minute, maybe less, to get the card to 93C and it was climbing as I exited the test. I've heard this is normal and I've heard its worrysome. Thing is, I paid the extra money for the cooling capabilities of this card. What would you guys do? And if you would RMA it, is there a way you would handle it to get a rma experience? Thanks guys...

 

[Deemo13]

85C is hot, but not too hard for the card to handle for sure. Just use MSI Afterburner as suggested above and set a custom fan profile.

 

[Surgeking]

out of curiosity, you said you have had problems, do you have a decent PSU? so many cards burning out is concerning, are you overclocking them?

When the card heats up are the fans running at 100%?

 

[krobjack]

Thanks for the quick responses:

I have not done any overclocking and I have (i feel) really good airflow. My case is the cosmos 2 and while I dont have any aftermarket cooling on the card, I do have the dual 120mm case door fans on the gpu. It just raised a red flag because my previous cards never got above 65c so I wasnt sure if something was wrong with this card. I refunded an xfx card 'cause it was cooking like this and was sold on the twin frozr but now im back to cookin. Im not sure how hot it will get with more than 10 minutes in a bf3 match but it was up to 86C in my last match.

As far as afterburner goes, I checked it during all this and I have the fans set to auto since I never had a heat issue before this particular card. It was at near 100% (96 or 98).

 

[krobjack]

I have a CM silent pro hybrid 850. When I was without this card for the majority of the past 8 months, I was using a gts250 in its stead. While I cannot do extensive PSU testing, I have compared the voltages on all rails as stated by AIsuite compared to actual volt meter results. That part was good. Amperage I cannot test.