Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi Chaps,

For some reason my HD7970 is running high temps and the load goes up to 99% then down to 5% and just fluctuates up and down when I am just in the desktop, even when I am not at the PC.

The temps range between 55-65 degrees Celsius. The fan kicks in and it gets rather noisy, I am wondering that there might be something wrong or it could be perfectly normal. I don't know so here I am asking for your advice.

Cheers.

I don't think that's normal behavior or acceptable temps for idling. My main 7950 idles at around 46°C with a room temperature of between 20 and 21°C. I only see between 0 and 9 % GPU activity in the Catalyst Control Center and the fan stays a constant 30% while idle.

When this happens, what kind of clock speeds are you seeing? Do they fluctuate at all?

You might want to look at the Windows Resource Monitor while your PC idles and see if there's any processes using the CPU while it should be idling. To do so, click the Start menu, type resmon, and press enter. If you have any processes listed that are using more than 1 or 2 percent of the CPU at idle, try stopping the process by right-clicking on it and clicking End Process. Then see if your video card is still being taxed on the desktop.

Thanks for the reply.

It was doing my head in today, and I did look at the processes and could not find anything.

My clock speeds were maxing out, everything would just go to the max and all the PC was doing was, well nothing! lol.

I have since done a complete re-install of Windows 7 and I no longer have the GPU load maxing out while the PC is just in the desktop. I do however have an idle temperature that hovers around the 60 degrees Celsius mark. Would you say that was acceptable?

Thanks

Glad to hear it's behaving better! It's still pretty warm if idling at 60°C, but probably not immediately dangerous. How fast does the fan spin at idle? How hot is the room the PC is in? What temperature does it reach under load?

Edit: I still think 60°C is on the high side for idle, but I checked around and found that while 40°C is normal under one monitor, 60° is fairly normal for mutli-monitor setups on the 7970. So, you probably don't have anything to worry about. Still, make sure it doesn't run too hot under load.

Thanks for the info.

At the moment the RPM is 1239 and is running at 27% and sitting at 59°C.

I have came across a process this morning, iehighutil.exe looked in to the file location and is in a temp file, something to do with bitcoin mining which may well explain the issues I had with the GPU load kicking in while in the desktop.

Ran my AVG and Malwarebytes and all is clean, stopped the process and deleted the files, it has not installed itself but will have to keep an eye on it. I am usually good with what I install/run on my PC, no idea how that file go there.

Cheers

did you by any chance try to install some coughcracked softwarecough? I had a very similar thing happen where my 6950 2gb was running at 90% non stop. can't say for sure but I have my suspicions it was a pirated black ops 2 that may have done it. only solution for me was a reinstall as well.

(mods: I'm sure there are rules about discussing piracy, I am not trying to encourage it, simply asking out of curiosity)

I had this issue recently and found the culprit! turns out it's was a backdoor (probably bitcoin) virus that was undetected by Security Essentials etc.

check your msconfig > startup options and look for something odd like this:


disable it and delete the file in your %appdata% folder.

Restart after and you should be fine