I am wondering why I am getting such bad temperatures with my XFX 7950.
I am litecoin mining with guiminer. When I initially got this 7950, I went with all stock settings (no overclocking etc and just using the guiminer recommended settings for a 7950 high usage) and I was able to get about 530-550khash however temps hit nearly 100 after a bit.
Since then I have underclocked and have been mining at around 83°C and getting about 430 khash on the card, which is much worse than I see other people mention. My current settings for this are around 750 mhz gpu core, 300 mhz memory speed, and I voltage dropped to 1.0 (this is underclocked considerably to lower temps). Fan speed is 90-100%. I've tried many many settings but this is the best I'm able to get and stay below 85°C.
My set up is a basic midtower smallish Antec case that is certainly not optimized for cooling, but its not horrible. It has an 80mm intake fan in the front and a 120mm exhaust fan in the back. There's no hard drives or cables in the way of that air flow from the intake to the video cards. I also have a second 7850 video card installed that I mine at the same time with (I get about 320 khash max and it runs much cooler around 55-60°C).
From what I've read, I should be able to get at least 500khash and stay at around 70°C pretty easily on a 7950, even with mediocre cooling and a second card running?
Is this the XFX 7950 core edition (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150590)? I've got two of these cards and with the intensity turned down to 17 hashing around 540 Khash they hover around 80c all day long. Turn the intensity up to 20 and they'll easily hit 90c. Compared to two Sapphire 7950 cards that happily run all day long at 640kHash and 72C. Bottom line, the XFX 7950 core edition sucks for mining(At least my two do).