So I'm still getting lockups and freezes even with my new system The only things that came across are HD's,PSU and R9 290. Happens in rF1 so I know it's a problem with something. Checking event monitor after the crash reveals nothing. I can go for hrs or minutes,crash is random. Tested R9's memory - Passed and it also does not crash on a graphics benchmark software. R9 was used as a bit coin miner previously and it 'whistles' in rF1 and rF2. Whistle is not constant it depends on the screen at the time. It has 2 bios onboard,doesn't matter which one I use,1 is latest from Sapphire.
So after some research I found out that Sapphire's bios limits the fan speed to something like 47% and call it 'quiet mode'. This may be an ATI thing rather than a Sapphire thing? This is all well and good but does not cool the card adequately at all when gaming. When your temps reach 90c you want the fan to actually cool the card down. At 47% it get's nowhere near cooling the gpu,it's quiet but not cool. Various programs out there that can give you control over the gpu fan speed. After testing various programs I settled on MSI Afterburner,basically because it shows the temp in my G15. The fan now kicks in and cools the gpu,sounds like a jet taking off when on full chat but my gpu is much much cooler,about 30c cooler I'm hoping this is the 'fix' to my lockup/freezing........testing.................
The original bios was causing the symptoms I was suffering. They released an updated bios that was supposed to address these issues. It was released as a 'performance' bios. Original bios being 40% fan speed and new bios being 47% fan speed. I updated one of the onboard bios to latest. testing with various benchmarkers the card got hot 90c+ but did not lockup or crash. So I assumed things were ok with new bios. However,rF1 and rF2 caused lockups/crashes. Temps were the same as benchmarking tests - 90c+ but for whatever reason caused problems. Don't remember how I came to try fan speed but after installing a fan speed controller I just put the gpu fan speed on 100% and was amazed how loud it was :O Then set a few parameters to control fan speed at certain temps. The results were fantastic and kinda shocking. Instead of running low 90's it was running low 60's at full load. Obviously fan speed had to increase and audibly it was noticeable but a few tweaks to temp/speed correlation and the increase in loudness was negligible. So it seems they gave you quiet over cool on a top end card which is just plain crazy. Then to call it a performance bios is just following bad with worse.
