^^ person up above, screenshot is essentially irrelevant since it appears you've either wasted money on water cooling or aren't using the stock fan/fan power connector, as both of them read -
My screenshot was to demonstrate to the esteemed Mr ssateneth that I indeed have a 5970 and as a matter of fact was running it on the same PC where I read his smug comment.
I had already demonstrated earlier that the fan can be controlled easily for OP by changing one number. In the case of the 5970 if OP was not sure which device is the correct one to control the fan then all he needs to do is change 85 to 100 two times, or whatever setting he wants if not 100%. I thought this would have been clear.
My mining rig is a HTPC/gaming computer in my living room in a tiny apartment. You'll know how loud those fans are from your own experience and that is why I have watercooling: because it is almost silent. And "wasted money" on it? Not really. Have you seen the premium that watercooled cards go for on eBay? Especially in my country where there are far less cards going around than say in the USA. In fact the completed listings feature of eBay shows cards still doing for essentially the same price I paid 12 months ago for just reference cooler fitted cards so please explain to me how I have wasted my money.
When the 6870 and 5970 in my rig were not watercooled, in summer the noise from the fans was so loud that people could hear it from outside the building, and a few people from neighboring apartments had made complaints about it to our body corporate committee. So something had to be done: watercooling or give up mining. Unlike a lot of people here I don't live in a giant property where I can hide a bunch of GPUs in the basement, garage or study room. How am supposed to explain to family and friends who come inside why the computer next to my front door sounds literally louder than some vacuum cleaners?
Not only suffereing from noise issues but with the reference cooler running at 100% fanspeed and stock settings I was getting 90-95 deg C temps on both cores and the some of the voltage regulators were exceeding 128 deg C regularly. Where I live it is common to have 30-40 deg C ambient temps in summer and I don't have 'proper' AC. Volterra's recommended maximum temperature for the voltage regulators on the 5970 is 125 deg C but surely over 100 deg C we'd expect poor lifetimes.
As for the waterblock itself well it is a syscooling block. As you'll see these days there are some reviews on various sites and they are all pretty scathing. At the time I purchased it was the cheapest available commercial solution and I thought I'd give it a try. Indeed some of those scathing reviews are written by me. Not only does the block have no coolant flow channel(s) over the VRM area of the card, but it has terrible machining tolerances above these areas. On any single GPU card having no direct coolant flow over the VRM areas might be acceptable but on a dual GPU card it is not. In hindsight a swiftech or danger den block would've been the way to go.
My overclock is also probably crap because my motherboard is half dead. 2 of the SATA connectors permenantly failed, 2 of the ram slots can no longer be used as the PC wont even boot with a single stick in them, and it has a host of other problems as well. The board is 5 years old now running essentially 24/7/365 for that half a decade, and will run some time more until I upgrade. The 5970 and other cards might overclock better if I played around with the settings more but I don't trust this motherboards stability so I see little point. I can't in good conscious try to even sell this board as a board+CPU+RAM combo so I am essentially going to run it until it fails completely or it is just so slow I am forced to upgrade.
You can see my setup in the pictures thread but I doubt you'll care since your comments come across as quite dismissive and/or elitist.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7216.msg2607283#msg2607283You'll notice if you follow the link I mention the extremely long coolant lines running between the waterblocks and the radiators, and that my pumps only deliver <1 liter per minute flow rates, this inherently limits the overclock potential as if the above problems weren't enough. If I wanted extreme performance and blistering overclocks I could have tried to put <1 meter of tubing and had a more conventional setup with superior heat removal capability.
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