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Hi,

I have a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 which I use for mining along with GUI Miner (poclbm kernel)

The clock frequencies of my GPU are: 850 Mz/ 1200 Mhz

I am running with the flags: -v -w 128 -f 1

While the mining process was running, I checked the temperatures reported by GPU-z in real time.

Following are the values:

Temperature: 81 Degrees
Fan Speed(%) - 62%
Fan Speed (RPM) - 2725 RPM
GPU Load - 99%
GPU Temp#1 - 81
GPU Temp#2 - 81
GPU Temp#3 - 87

Memory Usage (Dedicated) - 30 Mb
Memory Usage (Dynamic) - 30 Mb

VDCC - 1.163 V

I haven't performed any overclocking on this card yet.

I get a hashing speed of 375 Mhashes/sec to 380 Mhashes/sec when run with the flags mentioned above.

Is that temperature safe to operate on?
Should I go in for external cooling, and if so then which one do you recommend? Please post links to the models you recommend for cooling so that I can look for the same in my local stores.
Should I be getting a better performance from 5870 for hashing speeds? I checked on the wiki, and there are different speeds reported for the same model depending on the kernel and the flags used. I think I can get around 400 Mhashes/sec by overclocking the core frequency to 900 Mhz and underclocking the memory down to 300 Mhz.

85 is the rule not to break, use trixx to overclock it you can push the memory into the 300-500 range and should be able to get the gpu in the 950-1000 range, set a fan profile to bring the fan speed up to 85% or hiigher once it hits 70 and 100% if it hits 80

Thanks. I found this link which gives a review for the ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU from an Operating Temperature perspective.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1080/12/

Once I overclock it, the GPU will start running at 80 degrees. So, is it safe to run the fan at 100% always? Since, I am using it for mining, which means, the fan will be running at this speed for a long time.

I've had no issue with fans left at a hundred for months but ended up building a cooling rack just for the sake of noise and greater efficency

You mentioned about the cooling rack. Could you please provide more details about what sort of cooling mechanisms should I go for?

Which cooling fans, water cooling and other stuff? :)

I checked out the TriXX utility by Sapphire for overclocking the ATI Radeon Graphics card. It turns out that this utility was developed to support only the ATI 68xx and 69xx series of cards.

Among the ATI HD 58xx series, it supports only the 5850 GPU. So, unfortunately I won't be able to make use of it for my GPU. Is there any other software which provides similar features as TriXX?

when i say "cooling rack" it's my variant of the open air designs you see mostly, a system is enclosed with in the prototype(it works and i'm too lazy to build another until i have more rigs to put in it) cools 2 systems with a single box fan looks like this
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/8057/imag0049ha.jpg

as far as trixx is concerned it works just fine on 5xxx cards including 57xx and 58xx if it's throwing you issues i suggest trying one version prior to the one you downloaded