Video Card Issues -- Resolved?

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been having crashes with Guild Wars. My video card is new, an ATI 3850 512. Not doing anything crazy with it, no overclocking or anything. I've used RivaTuner in the past to check statistics and view clock speeds. I decided to use the tool again to see if there might be some heat issues with the card when running Guild Wars.

Strangely enough, Guild Wars taxes my system more than any other game. I run GW in 1680x1050 with full graphics details and 4xAA. Specifically, I don't use AA in any other games, unless it's an older title.

I wondered if these caused me some heat problems, by pushing the card to the limit. Turns out, that might be the case. With Riva Tuner running, I saw that the card pushed the 90C mark. That's Not Good. Everywhere I've read says keep it at 70C or under.

Using Riva Tuner, I'm able to monitor fan speed as well as card temperature. Even at 85C, the fan doesn't spin up past 25%. There seems to be some kind of problem with using the automatic fan speeds at a given temp to govern how fast the fan should spin. It's like the fan never speeds up. Consequently, I just hard set the fan at 70%. After setting the fan speed, I don't seem to get any readings past about 65C, and that makes me very happy.

I let Guild Wars sit overnight (since I reinstalled, let it download what it could to the .dat file), and had no problems. Ran around a little this morning, didn't have any further problems. I have hope that this will resolve the issues.

I'm a little disappointed in the fan management on this card. I'm not sure why the driver set would either A) Not spin the fan more at higher temps or B) Simply fail to set the fan higher by default. The default setting is 25%. Far too low, as I think I've observed.

Maybe a run through Frostmaw's will now be possible. If only we could get Mike's networking issues resolved.