Finally bought an AMD 7870

It's XFX' Core Edition with Ghost technology. The card is incredibly beautiful and maxed out all of my games.

But.. Tomb Raider is kind of strange.. it makes my card go up to 78C rather quickly. 74 if I turn tressfx off. But still, I'm not used to such high temperatures for any computer component. I do remember people saying that even 80c is normal for a GPU, but I just want to make sure.

It seems odd that one game can make a GPU outsource so much heat and the rest cannot.

Is Tomb Raider more demanding than your other games? How balanced is that game.......CPU/GPU? Some games rely too much on one and not the other, which could account for those results.

kbrady1979 said:

Is Tomb Raider more demanding than your other games? How balanced is that game.......CPU/GPU? Some games rely too much on one and not the other, which could account for those results.

Yeah, my GPU goes under full load, and the CPU barely goes up to 40%. Seems rather balanced.
I just find it odd since it is supposed to be an AMD optimized application.

Does it tax your GPU so much that it lags or stutters? I'm sure you have the latest driver for your card so that probably isn't the issue. It may be that Tomb Raider is just a really demanding game. Did you ever try to play the game with your HD7770? How did that go?

kbrady1979 said:

Does it tax your GPU so much that it lags or stutters? I'm sure you have the latest driver for your card so that probably isn't the issue. It may be that Tomb Raider is just a really demanding game. Did you ever try to play the game with your HD7770? How did that go?

Nah, the game runs beautifully smooth on ultra.
And the 7770 would do a fine job at high settings pulling around 39fps.
Never got that hot though, perhaps 65C max.

That seems to scale right, high settings at 65c and on a beefier card and ultra settings in the 70's. May try googling Tomb Raider and your card to see if there are other cases of high temps and if that is normal and if there is something to be done as I am no expert on games or video cards. Have you OC'd the card any?

kbrady1979 said:

That seems to scale right, high settings at 65c and on a beefier card and ultra settings in the 70's. May try googling Tomb Raider and your card to see if there are other cases of high temps and if that is normal and if there is something to be done as I am no expert on games or video cards. Have you OC'd the card any?

No, I have not overclocked it as it does not have voltage control. I don't think I even need to overclock it, it's pretty powerful.

But since it is the only game that even goes into the 70's I think it's just this game..

I would say you are right, it is probably just a demanding game. I would keep an eye on it and make sure the temps stay within the threshold. Also, try to google your card and game and see if others report similar results.....it may be normal.