ATI HD 4870 cooling system

[speedking34]

Hi,
I recently bought a Radeon HD 4870 (512gddr5). During intensive gaming session, the card's temperature goes up to 85~90°c, which is in my opinion really high. When Idling, the temp goes down to 47°c with fan at 35% efficiency.

I was wondering whether it would be worth buying a GPU heatsink/cooling system. I know that in the near future I am going to experiment with overclocking my card, so I know for a fact that those high temps are going to increase even more.

I've seen a few models of GPU heatsink such as the "Arctic Cooling Accelero AC-S1 rev 2 ".
If i was to buy one, would you recommend any specific model?

Thanks =)

[Webby]

Okay couple of things to consider.

1. Removing the supplied cooling will void your warranty.
2. Check to make sure that the fan is increasing in speed during gaming if it only goes up to 45% or similar then you may want to create a fan profile set to 60% (or similar) for improved cooling ATI have set the fan speeds low to keep the cards quiet but this obviously increases temperatures.
3. These cards will happily handle temps above 100°C but your right cooler is always nicer.

So first check the fan speeds you can adjust them in catalyst control centre in the ATI Overdrive section (where you would overclock the card). You may find that the stock cooling is perfectly adequate but just needs a bit higher fan speed.

[speedking34]

Hum, I was not aware that taking the stock cooling off would void the warranty, thanks for clearing that up.

I will look into those fan setting, mess around a little and see what kind of temperature I can get. I'll report back if I need help.

Thanks!

[Pob255]

The only warranty that's not voided by removal of the cooler is EVGA (as long as there's no physical damage to the card) and they don't do ati cards.

In theory you *may* be able to get away with swapping the cooler and replaceing it again if you ever need to RMA it and not tell them about it.
But of course we not do any thing like that would we however because some people would some manufactors now stick a warranty void sticker over the screws that hold the cooler on to stop naughty people doing this.

[Webby]

Oh I forgot to mention you will potentially need newer drivers (I think, it was either 8.10 or 8.11 they introduced it) to use fan control in Catalyst Control Centre, you can do it manually by editing the XML files of a profile manually.

See this thread where somebody did just that for a 4850.

http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-car...e-drivers.html

[speedking34]

It's fine, i've got the newest drivers available already. I managed to mess around with the fan settings, and by increasing the %, the card goes down to 75 ~ 80 c in-game. That's about 5 ~ 10 c less than before so i'm pretty happy.
Thanks

[Webby]

Cool, I'm glad that you got it sorted to your satisfaction

I would set up a couple of profiles one for gaming the other for desktop so you don't have to have the fan spinning so fast when idle it will also make it easier to change the setting as you can set it up to load the profile when you start a game or it adds it to the right click options for the system tray icon.