SXPS16 with ATI5730 - drivers

Hey guys,

For those of you who have an HD5730, do you use the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI's website or the drivers supplied by Dell?

On a side note, if you happen to have an SXPS16 with the HD5730, what kind of idle/peak temperatures do you see with the card? I don't know if the throttle@75C, hardcrash@85C that I have right now is normal. From what I can gather of posts on the forum, it seems like most people find temperatures around that range normal under load, but I get FPS drops as soon as the GPU hits 75C. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance for any replies!

Edit: I've had the laptop for less than 4 months, so I doubt it's due to massive dust buildup.

 

I have always used ATI's official drivers. My GPU maxes 71C and doesnt throttle. I have changed the thermal paste, guess thats what you need to do.

 

If you don't mind me asking, what are you typically running when your GPU is under load?

 

I run my GPU OCd, and I never exceed 75C under gaming load (Crysis Warhead @900p gamer settings for example), or 80C (77C was max at stock clocks) under FurMark, and have never gotten the GPU to throttle, though I've tried pretty hard to do so. The GPU shouldn't throttle until it hits 85C, and shouldn't force off the system to 95-100C. I use the AMD provided drivers (currently 10.11), and have never had a problem with them.

What BIOS are you running?

 

Running A09. I don't know... it's just really strange that I get throttle at 75 and crash at 85, since I know people have reported temps of over 90 before.

What I have tried in the past day or so is using a third-party tool "Expertool" which supposedly allows me to manually set the fan speed. I set it to a fixed 65% and that seems to help.

Out of curiosity, when your GPU is under load, does GPU-Z or another temp utility show a fan speed >30%? Without using a third-party tool, mine is always at 30% no matter what I'm running.

 

Yeah, regardless of how fast my fan is running, it always shows 30%. I think it's because the CPU and GPU share 1 fan, so instead of being controlled by either device, it is controlled directly by the BIOS, which messes with the software monitoring tools.

 

I'm thinking of doing a clean reinstall of the ATI 5730 drivers since I suspect that might be the problem. Though the last time I attempted to do a clean graphics driver reinstall without a driver cleaner, I somehow managed to corrupt my "user profile" and couldn't login until I did a system restore...

I'll try again with Driver Sweeper in a bit and report back.

 

So, I did a complete driver reinstall. Things like Catalyst Control Center now work, but I still have the problem that I throttle at 75, so presumably I'd still hardcrash at 85 (unconfirmed, haven't quite pushed it that far yet).

 

Try upgrading the BIOS to A11 or A12, they contain a newer version of the GPU BIOS that might fix your problems. The A09 is really only good for the 4670.