m9750-T7600g-Ati-3870 project

Hello people as the title states I have a m9750 that I traded for that had a bad 7950 in it with a core 2 duo 1.66ghz. I had an T7600g that I have been holding onto so that was a good upgrade for sure.
Next was the video card, after many hours of research on here on here I decided on an Ati - 3870, found one on ebay, made an offer and picked it up for $130 shiped

Installed new cooling pads and as5 on everything!

After installing it I had several setbacks and was thinking the card was bad
I decided to do a clean install of windows as a last ditch effort. It had win 7/64bit on it.
After finding the respawn partiton still there I tried multiple ways to access it with no luck. I installed xp on it in 1 of these efforts only to discover no driver support for the 3870.
Next up was win 7/32 bit, booted right into windows with everything except the webcam,media card, and touch keys installed.
Fully updated windows and took a look at the performance index and was surprised and disapointed at the same time, 7.0 scores on the video! and 5.8 on the cpu
installed Wow and Diablo3 only to be faced with multiple crashes.

After running several programs recording voltages and temps the video card would be at 120 degrees sitting at the desktop and would quickly spike to 185+ degrees then I would get a driver crash. Thinking a heat issue I picked up a cooling pad with the huge 240 mm fan and temps at idle definately dropped but still had crashes in games.
After messing around with undervolting the processor some I could run Wow but still crashed in Diablo3 so some progress!

I downloaded Ati drivers 11.1 and was doing a clean install when it crashed and then would not boot back up Ran the repair disks still no luck.

This time I installed Win7/64bit and the installation went superfast at least 30% faster than 32bit must have loaded better drivers in the boot up process is all I can think of.

I get into windows and just like 32bit everything except the webcam,media card, and touch keys installed. but unlike 32bit my desktop screen was smaller than the lcd, so I installed the 64bit Ati 11.1 drivers - Fully updated windows and all the drivers had to hide the WDDM Ati drivers as windows was trying to auto install them!
Took a look at the performance index 6.9 for the video and 5.8 for the processor.
So it seems the drivers arent boosting the Ati overdrive as much?
Fired up Diablo 3 and Wow and no issues! SWTOR is next

Observations:

I am currently running Prime95, coretemp, and clockgen.
after 30 min on stock temps would hit 90c/192f and the fans kick on and it drops to 78c/172f quickly then takes 4-5 minto creep back up to the fan threshold.
I am currently at 2461MHz and same routine.
Here is the odd thing turning off Prime 95 it quickly drops to 42c/107f but there doesnt seem to be any change in the fan, it is my understanding that there are 3 speeds but so far as I can tell just a bump up at 90c/192f.

Sure wish there was a way to drop that to 85c.

I did some searching on the web and cant find out where the thermal sensors are located as it seems these may be poorly placed, does anyone on here know?

 

AS5 isn't any good for the 3870's i'm afraid. The GPU Die sits slightly lower than the nVidia cards so you need a thicker paste with excellent thermal conductivity to make proper contact with the heatsink. You'll need to use ICD 7 or some other similarly thick paste to control the cards temperatures.

 

Or mod the heatsink a little bit so it fits like it should on the card. It requires some DIY knowledge but my card is at a more or less comfortable 80°C under Furmark.

Another, easier option is adding a copper shim between the GPU and the heatsink.

 

Have copper shims on the way, what drivers are you running on yours?

 

Latest AMD drivers. Haven't had much time lately to try and play games on it but the benchmarks run without issues.

 

Ok, so installed copper shims and new thermal paste and idle temps for cpu and GPU are down moreso for the GPU but still the same thing when I fire up a game the GPU fan stays at 30% all the way to 96c then jumps to 100% and slowly cools down. I still think this is a sensor issue not properly changing the fan speeds earlier.

 

It's true my fan doesn't kick in as fast as I would want but it isn't nearly as slow as yours. I've also noticed that ThermoFan (the Alienware monitoring app) doesn't react to changes as fast as other software.

It might be a vBIOS issue. I'm not too sure.

 

Yea I am looking into voltagage modding now, watching GPUz the card swaps from .900 v to 1.20 volts pretty quickly and it is when it makes this swap the temps really jump. 15 minutes in Diablo 3 I can get it to breal 100c with the bottom cover off it takes about 20 min to get there.

 

Ok dropped the max voltage from 1.2 to 1.1 and after playing Diablo 3 on max settings for 45 min 89c max temps! This I can live with! 1 odd thing though I walk away from the laptop for a bit with my character in town and come back to see the temp at 91c! as soon as I start moving it drops to 82c very odd for sure. This is with the bottom cover on.
Also the temps drop much quicker even if it stays on 1.1v but the gpu usage drops to 80% or so the temps immediately drop also unlike before where they were slow to drop for a few min after a spell of 100% gpu usage.

 

Yeah the fan thing happens with the Area 51 M15x as well, if you don't mind max fan speed all the time cut the yellow wire and that would have your fan run full on. I've only done it with a few laptops that I don't mind the extra noise and it solved the overheating issues I was having about poor fan control