I was able to hook my 7850 up and got AMD's Beta 12.9 drivers installed, but I had some concerns so far: - I noticed temps on load, using MSI Afterburner + OSD in both BF3 and GTA IV, would go as high as 103C. Is this normal? - My computer shutdown randomly on GTA IV after a while, but didn't with BF3 - memtestCL I think reported 20k errors, although I may of misread this. Should I be concerned?
I would e-mail or call the manufacturer's tech support department about it. Sounds like you got a bad card.
Hmm, this may explain the errors on memtestCL then. As for GTA IV, I have no idea what was up with that. I was just playing Black Ops for almost an hour without any issue (I think I saw the occasional shadow glitch, but not sure), and I was playing Saints Row 3 for about 10 minutes without issue too. Not sure why GTA IV would just shutdown though... Edit: Started the RMA process with Newegg
So I reapplied thermal paste a few times, and at some point I eventually had Black Ops running around 75C max (65C average), but in my attempt to make it even better, I actually made it worse :/ (back to spiking up to 100C+ quickly) It definitely seems like the GPU and Heatsink aren't getting contact that well, but I seem to be pretty bad at putting on thermal paste...
Put a tiny BB sized dot in the centre of the GPU then screw on the heatsink. Don't spread the paste around or anything, just put a dot in the middle and leave it....
So I think I found the issue. The way I had my SATA cables plugged in my motherboard (I was using the bottom set of ports), it would push up on my GPU heatsink a tiny bit (I overlooked this thinking it wouldn't do anything). I was running Kombuster, and temps hit 100C as usual, but then I pressed on the other side of the GPU (plastic) and temps dropped around 60C real quick. I reinstalled Windows a little bit ago and also swapped which SATA ports I used, so I'll verify if the cooling issue is fixed or not.
