What's the maximum safe temperature for a HD Radeon 6870?

I'm running a passively cooled HD Radeon 6870 in my PC. While using 3D Acceleration, the temperature climbs up to 95 degrees Celsius according to SpeedFan. It seems a bit hot, but on the other hand I've seen other GPUs being specified to run up to 120 Degrees Celsius. The system is very stable, but Battlefield 3 crashes every few hours or so. On the other hand it might be the game's fault and not related to the GPU temperature at all.

Does anyone know where I can find some manufacturer specs on the maximum allowed temperature for this GPU?

Thanks,

Adrian

Adrian Grigore

Posted 2012-01-03T21:45:53.857

Reputation: 1 773

@DragonLord, the 6870 has a built-in fan, so it's not passively cooled as in no fan and it remains cool because the case is cool. I assumed that the card is intact and is therefore not undergoing a more typical active cooling of say a hydro system. I have two EVGA 580s and they don't need anything more than fan cooling because my case has solid airflow. so it's entirely possible to have it work by the built-in fans alone. – tophersmith116 – 2012-01-04T02:48:37.140

Answers

AMD states that all of their cards can "safely" go to 120 C. However. anything over 100 is getting dangerous, in case your card happens to be on the lower end of temperature stability. 95 is still okay, but if I were you I'd get the msi afterburner program: http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm which should allow you to set the fan speed based on the temperature (possibly your graphics card manufacturer has something similar). if you can't keep the card cooled to at the very least under 90 C. it might be worth it to increase your airflow to keep it cool.

tophersmith116

Posted 2012-01-03T21:45:53.857

Reputation: 626

There is a concencus even that these 90-100*C temps are just fine. I dont believe it :-) , I have seen minor stability changes at lower temps for sure. What is often less seen , is some of them (not sure on this one) the ram is getting at about that same temp, and they use pads :-( to cool it. So even if the GPU can supposedly cope with it, whos looking at the rams :-) My cards didnt last vast years and game time until I ignored thier idea of usefull temps. – Psycogeek – 2012-01-04T06:48:30.073

I looked it up... Looks like there is a combo thermal pad and integrated plate on the 6800 series that connects to the physical gpu in the primary finned heatsink shroud. this is still a newer design as Nvidia and AMD moved from a pad to a small tubed heatsink for the memory and the fin array for the GPU. All of that being said, since the memory and GPU are tied to a single large heatsink, and the temperature gauge is on the heatsink, the reported temperature should be some kind of average between the memory and GPU. – tophersmith116 – 2012-01-04T17:36:04.080

Everything on the card has a safe operating temperature of 125 °C, even the video RAM chips. AMD is correct in their stating of 120 °C maximum operating temperature. But there is no reason it should be climbing that high, so try applying a new thermal compound.

skyler prahl

Posted 2012-01-03T21:45:53.857

Reputation: 21