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here is my 4870x2 cooling mod

waynio

waynio

waynio

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1 Nov 2008
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read everywhere the temps on this beast are high so i had a mod in mind incase it turned out true.
it does, at idle conditions straight out the box gpu1 was 75c and gpu2 was 90c so i put my plan into action here is the mod completed

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i took it apart, drilled small mounting holes for cable ties to go through on the top and on the sides, the front of the card i had to use a small piece of sheet metal which i bent and drilled because of the case being small with the memory cooling pins, 92mm fans cool the cores and the memory with the fans over hanging a little.

the fans are Scythe Kama PWM 92mm Fan - 4-Pin PWM kicking out 56cfm and are only 30db tons quieter than 50% stock fan speed

the mod obviously trashes the warranty but for me at least it was well worth it, i did the mod as soon as i seen the temps from the stock cooler, also it would only be good for if you are only using the 1 card, with crossfire it probably would not fit as it takes up around 3.5 slots.

i know i could have set the fan higher in the catalyst drivers but it gets quite noisy even at 50% and i don't think it would be good for the fan running high all the time, anyway it is up to you if you do this mod.

the end resulting temps went down to a steady 28c for gpu1 and about 38c for gpu2, and my system temps have come back down to normal, aloso load temps are much lower than stock idle temps.

ambient temps were 22c at time of testing

thought i'd add a pic of the temps
idletemps.jpg
 
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Not to take your achievement away, because it is a good job, but why did you do that? My GPU temps were exactly the same as yours! I put the fan upto 45% and now I idle at 40C and peak at 70C (quite a warm room). Not much louder either, but it cools so well I am not bothered!
 
I wouldn't do that to my X2 as i like the look and temps are not that disturbing and while i can see you have done a lot of work as someone else said that is just ugly :(.
 
You should have just stuck a 120m fan on a blanking plate and put it under the card, i did it on my 8800gt just took the top cover off the card so it showed the heat sink, no drilling and no void of warranty and it would have done the same job.
 
Those are excellent temps.

Nice mod.

Thinking of doing something similar if I can get my x2 working properly, but using one 120mm and a 92mm.
 
:confused:the goal of the mod was not to enhance its looks, but to enhance the cooling which was acheived without an increase of noise so:p

90c at idle nothing to worry about:eek: personally i think it is, even if ati says its ok for temps like that i don't, i'm used to seeing temps of 30c to 40c man i thought the 8800gtx was seriously hot but came nowhere near this.

i put the fan of an nvidia 9800gtx upto 100% the fan ended up dying so i had to do this mod on that and was impressed with the results so i knew it was a good mod that works which is why i was confident about doing it.

anyway it is not supposed to be a looker and was not aware the plastic case was a looker:D, i'm very happy with it
 
I have my HD4870X2 set to idle at <60C thanks to Rivatuner, and will automatically scale up the fan speed to compensate. The thing is, if ATI says 90 is ok at idle then who are you to second guess them? Are you secretly employed by them in their labs?

90 sounds like a lot because we know 90 celsius is too high for other PC components, but ultimately if ATI have released a card that idles at ~80C then they are obviously happy with it doing this - they will have tested it for extended periods of time at this temperature (and above).

Frankly if I was going to nuke the warranty on a high-end graphics card it would be for water-cooling, just hooking up a ghetto air cooling solution doesn't seem worth it to me.
 
The LHC at CERN has to be a few degrees kelvin at the absolute most, otherwise everything breaks down and it fails to work. Does that mean anything above 2K is 'way too hot?'.

Ironically there is such thing as too cold with computers. If there insufficient heat, the substrate (oft-talked about solder bumps, etc.) won't become plyable causing undue stress on other parts of the substrate. In essence, there is such thing as too cold and too hot. Now I'm not saying you're running too cold - far from it, I'm just saying you weren't running too hot either.

Losing the noise is fine, good idea. But worrying about the temps is silly. Not sure how people with no electronics, or better yet, packaging qualifications, can say if something is 'too hot'.

Nice to lose the noise though :) I hate loud fans.
 
For me it's about looks and performance. I have a slightly chavved up PC with a window and plasma lights etc. My kids love it. It usually gets positive remarks from visitors.
 
some seriously stupid replies in this thread. If the OP commented that HE thought it looked good then he might have failed and you might have been right to comment on how bad it looked. he wanted cooling performance, he got it, smeg off.

I did much the same though i took the shroud off, it does officially void the warranty as you need to take the entire sink off which is a pain in the behind, to get the shroud off. I ziptied a 120mm fan on with the deadspot roughly over middle between the heatsinks on the cores so both get pretty good coverage, I also get massively reduced temps.

Worrying about the temps isn't a problem AT ALL and you guys might want to learn about the card before you mouth off. Firstly 90C isn't hot in terms of this card, however thats idle, and you can't keep it stable with that kind of idle temp without a significant increase in noise from a higher fan speed. I don't want it, and even at 50%, which is more than hearable WITH my headphones on it still wasn't great temps or hugely stable. With a 120mm fan its now not noticeable over any other case fan, rock solid stable, and much much cooler.

You might also want to bear in mind several things, my card, along with many others don't always seem to reduce to idle clocks in windows, meaning needing the higher speed fan most of the time, which when watching tv, or just surfing is far more irritating and noticable than when in game and blowing crap up loudly.

Secondly, the memory and the shader core tend to run significantly hotter than the temps listed in CCC which are the normal gpu temps only. Try rivatuner, my mem temps are 10-20c hotter than the main gpu temp and the shader core is generally 10c hotter. So 90C in catalyst could easily mean 110C on the mem and that can easily cause instability.

Then theres the lovely little thing the new 8.10's do when you set fan speed. I'll set it to 50%, its decent enough, stable, loud but for no reason at all after 10 minutes, or after 10 hours it will randomly reset the fan down to the lowest possible speed, temps shoot up and my computer would crash. Thats fixable, though alt tabbing out of games isn't always useful, in Farcry 2 if I alt tab out it sets itself to a dodgey window mode so I have to exit the game, change the config file back to fullscreen =1 every time then restart the game, not remotely convienient. With the fan on the lowest speed and both cores under full load it can literally shoot the temp up in a matter of 10-15 seconds to a unstable crash inducing temp also.

I'm not a fan of Nvidia, they've put out so many dodgey drivers its a joke, but powerplay issues, ridiculous heatsink design, loud fans and very strange fan profiles have plagued ATi cards for the 3XXX and 4XXX series cards so far. The stupid thing is, there was never anything wrong with the old heatsink designs, or the standard, in use for 15 years fan profiles on the old cards either.


The only thing I would say is it was a touch silly to cut up the shroud as you can hold fans in place with zipties simply going around the card and tightened in the right place saving any physical damage to the card leaving it free to be RMA'd should it fail at some point.
 
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Nice mod - and glad it works for ya but if that was my card I wouldn't go cutting up the shroud :o

Still the damage is done now so you have to hope the card doesn't require an RMA at any point as you'll be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
 
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