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*** HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - OEM £97.99 ***

Interesting, I'm sure I heard my card shifting gears last night. From inaudible to barely audible at that!

I've got one of those Arctic Cooling towers that bungs the heat out the back of my case (via another fan), so hoping that will assist with case temps.
 
Widge said:
I've got one of those Arctic Cooling towers that bungs the heat out the back of my case (via another fan), so hoping that will assist with case temps.
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Currently I've a 10 year old Enlight case ... does have fans front and back but from that age they are only 80mm ... just ordered a new case to complete upgrade of main PC (+ extra bits I need to now upgrade kids PC using casts of from old main PC!) and while looking at case fans (now will be 120mm) was shocked to see the difference in air shift capabilities of 120mm vs 80mm (about 4x ... and thats not considering high perf/high noise models that could add another 2x)! So hopefully that will make a big difference.

Also discovered that there may be a solution to my gfx card positioning problem .... I've a Biostar 790FX mboard which has master PCIe slot at bottom of mboard (with only 2 PCI slots below it) and I use the one PCI slot that isn't obscured by the 4870 fan. Result is that the 4870 fan is right against the PCI card which must clearly impact air flow. and mean the fan is probably mainly circulating already hot air around the card cooler. Anyway, reading up on this found that should be able to use gfx card in the slave slot ... only downside will be that it will only get x8 PCIe lanes ... but from what I saw the perf impact is pretty minimal given its PCIe 2.0. Will do some experiments to confirm/deny this soon!
 
Major improvement on noise level! As mentioned before on my Biostar 790GX mboard the master (16x capable) PCIe graphics card is in 3rd bottom "slot" with the 2 PCI slots below it ... slave (8x only) PCIe gfx slot is where most mbs have main 16x slot. Since I have a PCI firewire card installed this meant the 4870 fan was virtually touching this PCI card - this clearly affects the air flow resulting in much high sound level and reduced cooling. I've removed the firewire card (I hardly ever use it!) and sound level is down significantly as is gfx card temps!
 
I just stuck Mass Effect through this at 1680 res, everything turned on. The silence from my machine was awesome, as was the fluidity of the game. The only thing you can hear in my office room now is the boiler behind me.
 
Well I sat down to use this proper today and disaster. The card goes to mental temps and kills the system. Checked inside, indeed argh, 2 wires only. Certainly no fan control. I don't know what to do here. The card idles around 60-70 and when playing Crysis, the entire thing cuts out! Right up to the 110's.

As it stands, if I can't change the speed of the fan, I'm screwed... I can't use the card. Not sure what to do here. No wonder I could barely hear the fan, its running dead slow hence the high temps.
 
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manic111 said:
I assume if I'm gaming at 1900x1200 it's worth forking out the extra £40 for the 1GB version?
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No... http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-091-PC :cool:

Orangey said:
His PSU is only 460W.
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460w is plenty as long as he doesn't have loads of HDs, everyone always drastically over estimates the amount of power they need.

In a review with an x6800 cpu the 1gb version used 334w under full load.

Edit: He got it anyway, my point still stands though :p

sonyaddict said:
i have an Inno 8800 GT clocked up 15%, Is this a serious better upgrade for me? :confused:
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I would say no, personally. I am running the same card and would want the 1gb version minimum (I play at 1920x1080) for it to be a worthwhile upgrade.
 
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PiKe said:
Don't these run kinda hot?
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Mine idles at just under 60C and goes a bit higher under load. So they generate a fair amount of heat which is not exhausted from the case. So you almost certainly need to take measures to ensure there's sufficient airflow through the case to ensure that everything doesn't slowly get hotter and hotter! Having fans front and back of my case to pull are in at the front and push it out at the back seems to be sufficient to keep things under control.
 
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