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4890 - reducing heat in 2d

Karve

Karve

Karve

Associate
Joined
29 Jul 2009
Posts
9
Hey all - I have a Sapphire 4890 - awesome card thank you OCUK. Cant believe how much power you get for your cash these days!

The only issue I have with it is the volume of heat it produces when idle... it lowers the clock down but even then it pumps it out.. in a small room in summer this is causing an issue.. If I could run less cpu clock and voltages when in 2d i think it would help.

Is there any software which will allow me to do this while keeping my 3d overclocked settings when required?

So far ive found a bit of info on editing the powerplay profile but i cant find the file to edit - ive also seen some discussion on flashing the bios but this seems a bit extreme to achieve what I need.

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
 
Karve said:
Hey all - I have a Sapphire 4890 - awesome card thank you OCUK. Cant believe how much power you get for your cash these days!

The only issue I have with it is the volume of heat it produces when idle... it lowers the clock down but even then it pumps it out.. in a small room in summer this is causing an issue.. If I could run less cpu clock and voltages when in 2d i think it would help.

Is there any software which will allow me to do this while keeping my 3d overclocked settings when required?

So far ive found a bit of info on editing the powerplay profile but i cant find the file to edit - ive also seen some discussion on flashing the bios but this seems a bit extreme to achieve what I need.

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Click to expand...

I've got a 4870. I just use 2 different profiles, set-up via the CCC software. Have you tried that?

Nomadd
 
volts only go so low and really makes next to no difference, the profiles only allow fairly specific changes, ie 240Mhz cpu clock and 1.013v(850mhz 1.313v 3d) and theres very little difference in voltage use/temp by default. What you can do and I do is use a 2d profile which drops the 2d memory speed to 490mhz(min you can go) which drops 15-20W off the power usage of the whole pc, doesn't really drop temps, but 20W less being pumped into the room is 20W less. By default 2d mem clocks stay high because there will be a minor flash when you set a diff profile, you don't want constant flashing so set a 2d clock with all 3 power modes at 490mhz mem, then when you game have a 2nd profile for all default mem speeds, you'll get one flash when you switch profile but not as powerplay goes in/out of various power modes.

Best you can do really, theres probably a way somewhere to get even lower mem speeds, maybe setting clocks through rivatuner or something.

Not sure if the voltage settings actually change voltage as you would expect a drop in temp/power output(using a power socket monitor) between 1.3v/850Mhz and 1v/240Mhz but there doesn't appear to be any at all.

Flashing with bios and these settings might enable better(working) voltage control, but you'd still some issues.

Not sure if Asus versions(which have overvolting options and a nice little app to go with it) allow better finetuning and dropping of voltage/power in idle.

it is a pain, and I wish both companies had better and working powerplay tech and both companies made cards that idle'd at next to nothing.

Ideally we'd all have intergrated gpu's in desktops that use circa 10W idle and discrete cards that only power up when games are used so they use nothing at idle. My guess is that won't happen for a couple years as when all cpu's have an intergrated gpu it would be madness to not use it.
 
^^ Great idea, I often wonder why its not possible to use my onboard graphics when not doing much, and have even thought about going through BIOS to dissable my 4870 when I know I'll juet be using it as a media PC for a while, but it seems too much of a ball ache.
 
tindale said:
^^ Great idea, I often wonder why its not possible to use my onboard graphics when not doing much, and have even thought about going through BIOS to dissable my 4870 when I know I'll juet be using it as a media PC for a while, but it seems too much of a ball ache.
Click to expand...

yup, the day they make it work well, will rock.

You can already use onboard ati gfx + a discrete card, or supposedly you can use it with, whatever version of crossfire its called, but afaik you still can't power down the discrete one when only using desktop.

Its a bit stupid as they could have been doing that for years, especially as amd intergrated boards are often almost an indentical price and have plenty of acceleration for video in the chipset gfx.
 
They used to do that on Nvidia's too, hybridpower. I think they dropped it recently though as they've got so good at dropping power down in 2D modes theres simply no call for it anymore.
 
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