Radeon HD5970 Issues

Hi all,

I'm looking for a little advice with regards to what I would class as 'peculiar' behavior with my HD5970. I've had this card almost since its initial launch and for the most part, it has served me well. However, as of late I have started noticing some unusual behavior from it, and this may have been evident previously, although I just hadn't picked up on it.

I'll list my general system specs to start with:

Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit
Asus Rampage II Extreme
Intel I7 930 2.8 (OC'd to 4ghz with a Corsair H100 water cooler)
Kingston 12gb HyperX Intel XMP Ram @ 1600mhz
Radeon HD5970 (XFX Edition iirc)
Corsair 850W modular PSU
Corsair M4 128gb SSD
Lian-Li A70F full tower case
2x Samsung monitors at 1900x1200 resolution

Some issues with the card came to my attention when I noticed that the fan started spinning up significantly once my monitor's had gone to sleep due to the PC being left alone for 15 minutes. This does not happen every time the monitors go to sleep, but does occur quite often.

From checking the temperature in the Catalyst Control Center, my card tends to idle around the 70-75 degrees mark, but when the monitors go to sleep, the temperature is, for some reason, ramping up to around 90+ degrees and as such the fan is spinning up to compensate. Once the monitors are woken up again, the temperature goes down to its idle levels and the fan adjusts down again.

Whilst in games (such as Call of Duty, Battlefield 3, FarCry, Star Craft etc), the card performs perfectly and does not provide any notable temperature issues (rising to around 85 generally, sometimes pushing 90 degrees, which from searching around seems to be acceptable for the card itself to operate at under stress) and does not provide any loss of FPS or any

However, I also play World of Warcraft, and have started to notice some issues with the performance in that game which I believe is related to what I mentioned above. Whilst playing the game, my FPS is never anything stellar (I can't maintain a steady 50-60 fps in any area of the game, unless I'm completely alone staring at a wall), which I find a little odd given the specs of my system - this has remained the same despite many different hardware iterations over recent years, although the graphics card has remained a constant since around December 2009 I believe (though this could be off).

The issue with Warcraft is not just what I feel to be a consistent lackluster performance however. When the game is left full screen, but the PC is left alone for any length of time (as little as 20 seconds), the performance of the game nosedives until it is only attaining around an FPS of around 10-15, appearing quite stuttery. Once I resume playing the game, the FPS picks up again and I can continue playing as if nothing is wrong.

I've also encountered a little trouble in trying to use the AMD OverDrive utility in the Catalyst Control Center, such as that if I enable it at what seems to be the 'stock' values of a 725MHz GPU Clock and 1000MHz memory clock, there are no problems. However, if I try to ramp this up at all (as the slider's are less than 50% and 10% across their bars respectively), then the card fails at the new settings. I can increase it slightly (around 20MHz) but anything else fails it, no matter how little the increment.

I'm not sure if any of the 3 things are related, although from the nature of the problems it would appear the issue with Warcraft frames & the temperature soaring when the monitors sleep is the same core issue as both occur when the PC is 'inactive'.

Sorry for the wall of text here, hopefully this makes sense and if you need any clarification or further testing doing to be able to provide any input, then please feel free to ask.

Many thanks!