HD 5870 Black screen fps drop

so your display card runs fine in all real-world applications, and you have no complaints.

when you beat on it with artificial tests, it falls over.

Answer:

don't beat on it. Live happily ever after.

Making do wasn't the answer I was looking for.

Oh, in that case, your card must be disaster, and you will HAVE to buy yourself a new one!

It does sound like you have a little bit of a cooling issue - what kind of dust accumulation do you have in there?

When I run that demo, my fans do the same thing - the temperature rises into the caution zone, but drops quickly when the test stops. The fan speed depends on where the temperature sensors are located - the processor cores will be a lot hotter than their heat sinks.

The card has its own fan, so it shouldn't matter, although I don't know what the failsafe temperature setting would be. That test pushes the card pretty hard, so it is going to get hot. Does it do the same thing with lower settings or resolutions?

I am running RAID 0 , Am i really benefitting that much from it ? Was thinking of just doing a single drive install and see how that runs, maybe this could be the root of my problems ?

RAID gets its speedup only on the second and subsequent large block Read/Written to a single large file, and otherwise it is no faster (but adds lots of unwanted complexity). Any intervening reads or writes eliminates and speedup you might have gotten if you were reading ONE large file.

The boot drive is especially badly suited to RAID, because it reads and write small files all over the place, in random order.

Those benchmarks just test the graphics, so your drive arrangements shouldn't make any difference unless they are heating things up. Moving the card may have put it into a cleaner airflow - I've seen topics about the fan going bad, how is it on your card?

many Mac Pros are I/O bound, not compute bound. (and they are very seldom Graphics card bound for ordinary work.)

Best results are from a really fast boot/System drive (possibly on a low latency SSD Drive) a separate drive for Source, separate drive for Destination, and a separate drive for Scratch. This reduces the amount of time spent fighting over and moving the single drive head all over the place to get to Source, Destination, Scratch, and the worst offender, Ssystem.

Applications will perform their best when Installed on the Boot Drive.

But you get the general idea. The "traffic jam" around the single Rotating drive in a capable computer like these ends up being the bottleneck.

Putting the Boot/Applications onto a low-latency SSD (and moving other stuff OFF to reduce competition for that drive) makes it seem like you got a brand new computer.

User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

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