Afterburner + CCC Fan Question

jumpnmove

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Dec 24, 2010
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So I've been running Afterburner 2.1.0 for the last 3 years with my Sapphire 6870 to better control the fan temp curve. Apparently it turned off yesterday or didn't load on start-up like it should or something. I just know it wasn't running for the last day. Yesterday, I was playing Bad Company 2 with a friend and it completely locked up. Which normally I don't think much of. The game always used to randomly lock up once in a while, so I restarted (apparently it still didn't load) , called it a quits for the day after that and had some errands to run and didn't play anything else until today when after watching some 720p videos, I noticed the GPU temp was really high at 70C. Normally its around 55C just watching through MPC. That's when I noticed Afterburner wasn't running. I turned it back on, the temps dropped way down. So then I checked RealTemp and saw that it had hit 103C when playing BC2 the other day!! It hadn't been acting up, so I thought I might have been lucky and went to play some League of Legends, and then the massive screen tearing began. The entire lower half of the screen tears and doesn't know where its trying to display. Resizing and dragging windows triggers the same effects some of the time. Normal explorer windows not so much, but some game windows, and the ATI CCC panel in particular trigger it. So pretty much my GPU is on the way out. Which after 4 years fine, whatever, but i'm not exactly thrilled.

So to the point. When Afterburner is used, does it permanently disable the ATI temperature control even when the afterburner program isn't being run? I never had Overdrive enabled, so why didn't the Catalyst software kick the fan into gear and instead let it hit 103C before overheating the card?
 
103 degrees! That's to the point where it is damaging hot, though I doubt it was running at that temp for a long time, do it shouldn't have done anything, but the card has had it's last days, which it has done well for 4 years.

To your question;
When you use afterburner, this does override the AMD CCC, but when the GPU gets hot, Afterburner should automatically kick in the fans, sounds like your catalyst didn't have permission to, which is unexplained.

With Afterburner, use that as your fan controller, as it is much better then the CCC. Set the fan manually in afterburner, and as temps go up, the fan speed will increase, this is the best way to do it as it's just the one software controlling the card overclock and fan speeds.