Attention HD5970 owners

[Lord_Farken]

Signed up just to post in this thread

I've got similar problems with my Powercolor HD5970 and the EK water block.

With the stock cooler it's fine, but for me, with the water block attached about 10-15mins into a gaming session the PC just locks up/freezes without warning. No artifacts or driver resets or anything just sudden lockup.

I've tried several driver versions but that doesn't change anything.

After some 6 odd remounts of the block I've put double the thermal pads in areas I noticed there wasn't much/any contact with the block, so everything is contacting correctly.

Temps are good, about 30C idle on GPUs and 50C (off the top of my head) for the VRMs. Under load GPUs are in the low 40's and VRMs in the 70's I think it was.

It's weird though as it take about 15mins before it'll lockup. Two games I've been able to play without locking it up. Ghostbusters with the 30fps limit set in the game menu (60fps option locked it up after a bit). The other is Star Wars: Unleashed, played that last night for a few hours without problems, though that was after a remount so might try Dirt2 or something again tonight to see if the lockups still happen.


Just thinking, if the CPL chips apparently don't need cooling, what would happen if we don't apply the thermal pad on those chips?

that a good idea to try,if mine do it ,I will try it
the stock cooler in reality is passing the heat from the gpu,s to them so they
always warm , now come the water block keeping everything super cool
according to ek eddy that don't need cooling ,so skipping the pad should be fine
however if the problem is the too cold gpu , were are screwed
ati probably need to do a revision ,to totally fix this
but don't think they are in a hurry because they selling like hotcakes
and it work fine with stock cooler
in other though why don't try to RMA ,just don't mention the water block
say that crash stock