Radeon 7870 80% activity and rising while Idle!

[Hume]

I have a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 2GB Edition graphics card. This is my second one since the 1st once suffered from the known GSoD issue.

While updating to the 13.4 driver the windows installer stopped working. I thought nothing of it since the installation of the driver continued and the end result was successful. Not 20 minutes after that and while browsing the web my card started working at 80+% activity and gained 5Celcius per second! The fan was working at 70+% too! In a matter of seconds I shut down my PC. The temps went from the normal 30C to 55C in 5 seconds!

Uppon restart everything seems fine, but what was that?! Any ideas? Should I be worried?

 

[cookybiscuit]

Windows sometimes thinks its funny to run a performance analysis on your system for no reason what so ever and without telling you, could have been that. If it happens again open the task manager and check processes/services for anything suspicious.

 

[ur6beersaway]

Are you on win-8? If so install 13.5 beta driver. It will install normally

 

[Hume]

windows 7 x64. Now whenever i do something as simple as watching a video the activity is at ~87%. Is this normal? I remember it being ~25%. Should I just uninstall the catalyst then driver sweep then reinstall?

If so should I use the option that removes everything?(meaning chipset drivers as well)

EDIT: I uninstalled and reinstalled 13.4 drivers. Still the same.

I run an HD video fullscreen then I quickly close it and open my catalyst control center. It shows 80+% activity for maybe a second then it drops back to 0%.

I dont think this is normal, if I'm not mistaken it would hover at ~25% before going from 13.3 to 13.4

 

[smeezekitty]

Can you try Catalyst 13.1?

 

[Hume]

I am going to stresstest for a while to determine whether these obsurd flactuations in activity are harmless then I will revert to 13.1 since its the previous stable version. The 13.3BETA ran just fine though. Could it the card? I got it just yesterday as I had my previous once RMAd.

I am more worried about the rising in temps and activity while idle that happened before, I though my card would fry!

EDIT: The temps are higher under load by 3-5C, which is not important. But, I realized the fan is at 50% now, while it used to be at 30-40 under full load.

Something's up.

EDIT2: Turns out I don't experience these activity spikes while idling with 13.1 AND 13.5Beta drivers. On a maybe related note, I've had windows Installer stop working while both uninstalling and installing. The installation would continue normally with no errors. I driver sweeped when that happened. Now after I installed 13.5b the installation was carried out normally but the installer informed me about several warnings, which none of were presented in the log. Everything was installed successfully.

This card is hotter than the one I RMA'd and under load the fan reaches 60+% speeds. Do you think that's related? I've noticed some minor artifacting while using the 13.1 too while playing Dota2, but it could just be valves terrible programming.

I am confused, tired and dissappointed.

EDIT3: I have noticed that the 87% activity spikes happen while browsing certain sites, for instance Hugelol. It doesnt happen on facebook though. This is confusing!