My graphics card...(Help!)

[Velenda]

<p>Is an ATI Radeion 4870X2. It runs most games quite well...however it runs them best...windowed. </p><p>I dont know what it is but every single time I try and run a game full screen, the card fans just howl like crazy. Is there a setting in the ATI controll center that will make the fans a bit more quiet? It's almost like it's working way to hard for what it has to do....even when I put all the settings on med and low.</p><p>It's annoyong because most of the time it completely drowns out the sound and music of any game I'm playing.</p><p>Any help would be great. >_<</p>

[Coolit]

<p><p>I had one and it was loud also, I'm sure there is a slider to turn the fan down on the control panel but I'm not sure how "safe" that would be. </p><p>With regards to running better in windowed mode, it's because the X2 cards are in effect two cards so when you put the game in windowed mode crossfire disables. EQ2 has negative scaling in crossfire and runs better with it off. </p><p>If you want to play in full screen just disable crossfire in your cards control panel, it will have the same effect as windowed but you'll be full screen <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p></p>

[S_M_I_T_E]

<p><cite>Velenda wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Is an ATI Radeion 4870X2. It runs most games quite well...however it runs them best...windowed. </p><p>I dont know what it is but every single time I try and run a game full screen, the card fans just howl like crazy. Is there a setting in the ATI controll center that will make the fans a bit more quiet? It's almost like it's working way to hard for what it has to do....even when I put all the settings on med and low.</p><p>It's annoyong because most of the time it completely drowns out the sound and music of any game I'm playing.</p><p>Any help would be great. >_<</p></blockquote><p>When I run my 23.6 Viewsonic in 1920 x 1080p at 60Hz on the 4890 Saphhire on High Quality my card heats up even in my full tower and blows like a jet.  If you down the fan in the CCC manually, expect lockups often since the fan is blowing to cool it down. </p><p>I had twin 4890s and one of them out of the box had a noisey (intermittent bad bearing) fan every now and then.  After a year it died, I kept crashing my whole computer till I took out the questionable card.  I've been living on the other normal sounding 4890 the last year and recently my textures went berserk and I knew it was time to put the old card out to rest. I stepped up to the 6970 which runs at 20ish watts idle (unlike the 4000 series) and the computer room I'm in has thermometer so I can see what my body + case + monitor heat it up to.  Honestly 78F is too much.  68F means your video card can run cooler, faster, without the fan blowing like a jet. </p><p>If your room is hot you're [Removed for Content]'d and if you get around the fan speed you'll get lockups since it is a symptom not a cause unless you have one with a bad bearing like I had that you limped on for a year.</p>

[S_M_I_T_E]

<p><cite>Coolit wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><p>I had one and it was loud also, I'm sure there is a slider to turn the fan down on the control panel but I'm not sure how "safe" that would be. </p><p><span style="color: #ff00ff;">With regards to running better in windowed mode, it's because the X2 cards are in effect two cards so when you put the game in windowed mode crossfire disables. EQ2 has negative scaling in crossfire and runs better with it off. </span></p><p>If you want to play in full screen just disable crossfire in your cards control panel, it will have the same effect as windowed but you'll be full screen <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></p></blockquote><p><strong>OP</strong>, I also saw this when I ran my twin 4890s in Xfire.  It didn't give me the FPS I expected having that 2nd card.  Stepping up to the 6970 lets me run around in extreme quality (except no waiting for refesh triple buffer stuff) even in raids since the arch. on the card is different.  (Quad 3.8 GHz 8GB Ram for reference)</p><p>Just some places with gazillions of effects I have to step it down to <em>very high quality</em> settings since I've maxed out the GPU software with all the fancy new shader effects that overstep whatever the game does as well.  Morphological Filtering, edge dectection etc. choices in the Catlyst Control Center.  For $350 from newegg last week a single 6970 was a better use of $ than the $450 x 2 I spent 2 summers ago for twin 4890s.</p>