Attention HD5970 owners

[jcool]

I have tried and ruled out everything else guys... sad but true. Now for the bios flash, a question:

ATIFlash displays 2 adapters (0 and 1), one is the master card the other is labeled as slave. Which one do I flash? Both, or just the 1st one?

[JoeBar]

Coldbug at +35C?!

It better called a warmbug...

[zalbard]

I have tried and ruled out everything else guys... sad but true. Now for the bios flash, a question:

ATIFlash displays 2 adapters (0 and 1), one is the master card the other is labeled as slave. Which one do I flash? Both, or just the 1st one?

Both I suppose.

[jcool]

Actually no.. there is a master and a slave card bios, you have to flash them separately. Trying the Asus bios(es) now, from here: http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/i...ace=&memSize=0

By the way, this is NOT funny guys.. possibly 600$ down the drain for this POS card. I can't even RMA it since the friggin thing works fine with the stock cooler!

[zalbard]

Nope, not funny.
While Radeon 58xx cards have been mostly great from the start, 5970 still seems screwed both driver and BIOS wise.

[jcool]

Neither the Sapphire OC nor the Asus bioses from TPU seem to fix the issues, still getting freezes if the temps are low (IMMEDIATE freezes too).
If the card is a little warmer everything is perfectly fine, I can run FURmark as long as I want with the rad fans turned off.

Gonna try with the Aquacomputer cooler tomorrow (maybe it cools worse = better for me lol), otherweise I'm just gonna have to sell this card to some die-hard aircooling fan

[wez]

Neither the Sapphire OC nor the Asus bioses from TPU seem to fix the issues, still getting freezes if the temps are low (IMMEDIATE freezes too).
If the card is a little warmer everything is perfectly fine, I can run FURmark as long as I want with the rad fans turned off.

Gonna try with the Aquacomputer cooler tomorrow (maybe it cools worse = better for me lol), otherweise I'm just gonna have to sell this card to some die-hard aircooling fan

Wow, this is some weird stuff...

Is it possible for you to reach those low temps with the stock cooler, using cold air?

[jcool]

I suppose so.. as soon as the card runs warm, there is no problem. I just cranked it up to 1,2V and 1Ghz core, been running milkyway@home fine for the past few hours at @45C core.
Problem is, if I shut the rig off, the card will cool down.. freezing immediately upon entering 3D.

[Scaniris]

Well.... was a good idea to move away from this HD5970... I have no stability issue with my quad sli today, more happy with it than with my HD5970. Hope you'll find a fix soon jcool, it's an unpleasant situation! And the worst is that because of the watercooling, you are not able to claim for RMA normally. Grrr.... Are you sure you can't mount the stock cooler on a very clean manner to claim for RMA?

[lowdog]

well my 2 powercolor do not crash at lower temps

Perhaps you can upload the Master and Slave bioses from your card here for us to try out then.

[ckool]

Oh man this is not good at all,i was in the market for 2 x 5970 with Ek blocks to go with it,and i probally would have bought it already if it wasnt for the shortages,also i have been keeping an close eye in lowdog's problem ever since he posted on OCAU,so i googled it and found this thread here..... im so disappointed atm.

[safan80]

I have not seen any DangerDen block owners with this problem so far. If any are have trouble please chime in.

[nusihb]

My Powercolor 5970 runs fine with the DD block, no lockups at all at 950/1200/1.25v.
I did have some lockups earlier (that I didn't have with my older 4870X2 card), but I just had to raise the CPU voltage a notch (1.37v - 4.4ghz i7).
Based on that, it would seem that this new 5970 is a little more sensitive to CPU O/C... or it was just a coincidence.

[Serpentarius]

i wonder if it's safe to splatter the whole block with TIMs and mount them?

[lowdog]

My Powercolor 5970 runs fine with the DD block, no lockups at all at 950/1200/1.25v.
I did have some lockups earlier (that I didn't have with my older 4870X2 card), but I just had to raise the CPU voltage a notch (1.37v - 4.4ghz i7).
Based on that, it would seem that this new 5970 is a little more sensitive to CPU O/C... or it was just a coincidence.

Yet another one claiming no problems with Powercolor 5970.....how about giving jcool the Master and Slave bioses so we can test them out.

I don't think the 5970 is more sensitive to cpu overclocks. The fact that you have already had lockups when watercooling the 5970 isn't a good sign though.

[Diverge]

My Powercolor 5970 runs fine with the DD block, no lockups at all at 950/1200/1.25v.
I did have some lockups earlier (that I didn't have with my older 4870X2 card), but I just had to raise the CPU voltage a notch (1.37v - 4.4ghz i7).
Based on that, it would seem that this new 5970 is a little more sensitive to CPU O/C... or it was just a coincidence.

I agree. I had to redo my cpu overclocking when I first got my 5970 too.

edit: guys that are having problems should try stock cpu clocks / voltages to rule out that possibilty. if it works then, time to start dialing in your stable overclock.

[jcool]

Are you sure you can't mount the stock cooler on a very clean manner to claim for RMA?

Sure I can, but what am I gonna say? That the card has a coldbug at +35C and therefore doesn't work with water cooling?
The are either gonna laugh or go WTF.. I mean I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't verified it like a hundred times now.
Remember, the card runs perfectly fine using the stock cooler (because temps are never that low to begin with)

Yet another one claiming no problems with Powercolor 5970.....how about giving jcool the Master and Slave bioses so we can test them out.

I don't think the 5970 is more sensitive to cpu overclocks. The fact that you have already had lockups when watercooling the 5970 isn't a good sign though.

I already tried the Sapphire and Asus card bioses to no effect. ATIFlash reported the same ucode and build date anway so I guess the bioses are all the same just with a different subvendor ID.

edit: guys that are having problems should try stock cpu clocks / voltages to rule out that possibilty. if it works then, time to start dialing in your stable overclock.

Always a good idea, yeah. I tried stock settings when I was having trouble right from the beginning. Obviously didn't help though, especially since my OC is 24h prime stable (needs to be because that machine runs WCG 24/7 and is also my "work-PC" ie needs to be reliable)

As of now, I am pretty much out of ideas here. I'd appreciate it if anyone else having mysterious lockup issues with the 5970 on water could check if their card also has a "warmbug".

[K404]

Some nVidia 78-series cards were the exact same. +35. Starting the computer on a cold morning was a nightmare.

Its weird though... some guys solved their problems by increasing a thermal pad height?...

[Scaniris]

you're right I missed it! Sorry for my mistake... in fact it's running @550.

But I can't test it because I swapped this HD5970 for 2x GTX295... So... the new owner of my HD5970 didn't noticed any problem for the moment, I warned him before the deal that I had some issues so he's aware about it but until now didn't report any issue. After driver update during 1 day I didn't had any issue too. But you're right, my Furmark test was not good, and thank you for the information I'll take care with my future Furmark stability test to run the renamed.exe. I don't know what it is but I'll find it. Thanks

Well finaly I had a look on other screen shots I did, and BOTH GPU are really @ 725 during the Furmark test, on the screen shot you can read 550 because the Furmark is running into the background and the GPU downclocks because of that, but the test clock speed was 725MHz, no mistake finally.

But anyway... finally.... seems that Diamond and extreme cooling are not compatible, imagine a N2O cooling there...

My temps were as low as yours, but I can't make sure that the low temp was the provoking component I had a XFX card. And support by XFX was not really aware of this kind of issue...

[Dude_Person]

I'll check out my card tonight. Hopefully I can get the temps that low. Mine is also an XFX.

I haven't had any lockups though so either my temps are higher than that, or I don't have the problem.

[lowdog]

Wierd thing is though if you uninstall the ATI drivers and just use the windows drivers then there are no lockups in windows when in 2D.

SOmeone also mentioned that he uninstalled the CCC and just left the ATI drivers on his system and then all the lockups went away.....perhaps CCC get corrupted when a waterblock is on the card and there is no fan attached/low temps/bios and driver getting confused.

I don't have my waterblock attached so if jcool still does perhaps he can try uninstalling CCC and see if that fixes things???

[EvilClocker]

here is my 2cents. Ive been through 3 HD5970.. and I have EK, Dangerden, Koolance block. Not to mention I had (3) Defective HD5970.. there are some Q/C controll issues with them (ATI HD5970 )and as far as the Blocks.. I found issues with Koolance, and EK block. I know all the haters out there Dont like Dangerden Block. and in my experience is the best out there!

[lowdog]

here is my 2cents. Ive been through 3 HD5970.. and I have EK, Dangerden, Koolance block. Not to mention I had (3) Defective HD5970.. there are some Q/C controll issues with them (ATI HD5970 )and as far as the Blocks.. I found issues with Koolance, and EK block. I know all the haters out there Dont like Dangerden Block. and in my experience is the best out there!

Can you explain HOW your 5970's were defective and also what specific problems you had with the EK and Koolace blocks.

Just that this info may help us determin what our problems are.

Thanks.

[sargatanas]

well i have 4x powercolor, 2 in mine and 2 in another build for a friend.
all of em have the same prob: sometimes they freeze in 2d mode -> simple fix: just make a new profile with higher 2d settings and all works perfect.
and it doesn't make a difference if they are on water or stock. for me, it's just a driver issue and the ek's works perfect and no cold/warmbug too ^^.

mb u should try it too

[Levesque]

I was able to finally install everything. I'm using the EK block with the ''double the pads technique'' on my Asus 5970. 3 hours of running without a single freezing or problems for now. Surfing the net, playing games.

Idle temp on my 5970 is 22-23 celsius. Furmark reach around 33-36 celsius. Stock speed for now (not enough time!). I've played 2 hours of Resident Evil 5, 2560X1600 8X without a single problem this morning. So no ''cold bug'' for me in both 2D and 3D. I'm using 9.12 with the 9.12 fix on top (installed 9.12 over 9.11, then the hotfix). EK block working fine on my side.

Only thing I did is put fan control in CCC in ''Manual'' at lowest setting (20%) instead of ''Automatic''.