HORRIBLE HD7970 Performance

[zale]

 Hello,
I got a Club3D royalQueen HD7970 and it is horrible performance-wise, or I'm doing something wrong:

I underclock the GPU to 900Mhz core clock and 750Mhz mem clock,
Set the Fans to 100%
Run cgminer with -I 7 (results in just 530MHash/s with those clocks) and the temps go up to 95°C and then the PC shuts down.
It runs at about 450Mhash/s if I don't use -I 7 which results in temps from 90-92°C...
I don't think this should be happening.. is anyone having the same problems or can help?

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[crazyates]

Take the heatsink off, and repaste the GPU. It's usually only a few screws, and pretty easy. It should not be running that hot.

[coastermonger]

You might also want to consider installing a program that manually overrides the fan control on your system.  Google: speedfan

[MashRinx]

Take the heatsink off, and repaste the GPU. It's usually only a few screws, and pretty easy. It should not be running that hot.

I don't disagree with this suggestion, but do keep in mind that this may void your warranty on that card.  That being said, if you file for an RMA, this may be hard to tell if you can remove the screws without messing up any stickers that would be a giveaway that you did so.  Frankly, they should thank you for improving on their crap paste job to start with...

[dogie]

I'd just RMA this straight away. Your card is likely thermal throttling, hence the terrible performance.

[bcpokey]

I'd just RMA this straight away. Your card is likely thermal throttling, hence the terrible performance.

Card is likely defective, hence the PC shutdown. So yeah, RMA might be in order.

Just as an aside, maybe take the old manual peek to make sure the fans are actually running as they should be, and nothing is blocking them. You'd be surprised what the eyeball can do for you in terms of diagnostic troubleshooting.