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Anyone knowledgeable about ATI graphics cards:

Have you observed the on-board fans in the graphics cards not working at all unless the ATI Overdrive feature has been enabled from the Catalyst Control Center and the fan control set to manual and given a specific percentage value?

If you have, what models have you observed this behavior in and under what circumstances?

I have Windows XP Pro SP3 and all the latest updates, including the latest version of the ATI drivers and CCC. My card is HD4870 from Club3D and it's of the CGAX-4872DD to be specific.

I've been experiencing this problem since day one and no update I have found to anything has fixed it. As long as I have both Overdrive and manual fan control, the fan works and the card keeps cool. As soon as I either disable manual fan control or disable Overdrive, the fan simply dies and refuses to do anything, which sends the temperature soaring into the 81 - 83 C range, which my machine obviously does not like at all.

I have to run the fan speed at 40% or less to keep the noise level tolerable and at 40% it the temps reliably stay at around 58 C, 62-64 under medium to heavy load.

Does anyone have any idea on what causes this? Is it the graphics card BIOS version or could it have something to do with the fact that the original drivers for the card were installed with the full admin account and updates have later been done through my regular (but still admin privileges) account? Or is it something else?

I have this exact same problem on my Radeon 5770, and I have no idea what the catalyst (ha ha oh god i'm not funny) is. I haven't found answers elsewhere.

Same thing, not sure if a fix was ever created so I just create profiles of different fans speeds, 40% seems to be a good compromise on noise/heat management. In intense games I go to a 50%+ profile. It does seem to override if it hits critical temps had a few times the fan would speed up on it's own but it's still dumb or the sensors suck, they show different temp than my dedicated sensor program. So the fan will burst higher speeds for 10-15sec then stop, then temp goes up and it does it again.

Ghetto Edit: I should mention that I'm on Windows 7 Ultimate x64, so the problem is on multiple OS's.

I've got a XFX HD 4650 and no problems so far, so while apparently it isn't limited to one model, it isn't affecting all models.

Hmmm...all this sounds fairly similar to the issue I've had with my own ATI HD4870 from day one, where the graphics seem to die whenever I'm running a game. Never thought to manually change settings in Overdrive though. I'll have to try that when I get back to Aus. Would be interesting if it works.