weird heat spikes on gpu

[Dean Wilkinson]

Ok i have a question, is it normal for a idle graphics card to heat spike?

By heat spike i mean it run mostly around 40c but in random intervals for less than a full second it spikes to 60c and returns to 40c... it does this rather frequently....

i not tested in detail under load yet.
are these spikes normal? what could cause it? and what can i do about it?

 

[ASHISH65]

reinstall the drivers first.

what is your specs?

 

[Dean Wilkinson]

Radeon HD 6970

intel q9550 2.83ghz quad core
8gb ddr3 corsair

windows 7 64bit

system itself is fair old old but its always been stable and run modern games on max without a sweat, at least till recently when i had few random crashes, and I wondering if the heat spike are the cause.

I just done test under load playing the new tomb raider on max settings, and CCC tells me the temp was 75c, speedfan and gpu-z say the average was 75c, but they was fairly regular spikes hitting 90c....

I decided to manual overide the gpu fan to 75% and then CCC tell me temp is 65c, speedfan and gpu-z says average is 65c, but spikes was about 76c.

So for whatever reason, the average temp are well within safe limits, but the spike tempurature are whats worrying, it may only spike for few seconds, but it doing every 20-30 seconds ish.

I also dont want be manually overiding fans all time, seem the auto fans are bit lame to me

 

[ASHISH65]

hmm, this mostly due to gpu issue.

though i suggest to reinstall the windows