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Coolest Mid range card

tindale

tindale

tindale

Associate
Joined
12 Jan 2004
Posts
278
Location
Bicester, Oxon
I'm looking for some advice, as cooling my machine (rig in sig) is getting a little difficult due to the amount of heat my 4870 chucks out.

So the question, is there anything comparable, or slightly less powerful, which will give me less problems? How do nVidia cards compare for heat?
 
That 4770 looks tempting, I'd miss the power though, but 90% of the time I'm just turning money into heat whilst just watching the TV
 
What problems are you facing exactly? Is your CPU overheating, or are the ambient case temps just a bit too high for your liking?

You could possibly add more case fans to help shift the heat, or change the cooler on your existing 4870 to enhance cooling. If using a reference cooler on the card even just reseating the cooler using a decent thermal compound should help.
 
At the moment its not too bad, I just have the case fans a little louder than I'd like, and the fan on the 4870 is running at 35% which is when it gets a bit noisy.

Mainly though, whilst behind the TV cabinet yesterday playing with speaker cables I realised just how much heat is being chucked out the back of the PC case, and that means I'm paying for it :(
 
Thanks for the idea Phage, but I'm a bit worried with any kind of different cooling method that the card won't be running any cooler (or using less watts) but will just be better at getting rif of the heat, which is still going to keep my lounge nice and warm.
 
tindale said:
Thanks for the idea Phage, but I'm a bit worried with any kind of different cooling method that the card won't be running any cooler (or using less watts) but will just be better at getting rif of the heat, which is still going to keep my lounge nice and warm.
Click to expand...

Well, it's a net nil on your heating costs in Winter.
 
Short of buying a less consuming card there is nothing you can do to scale back he wattage at idle.

Using the CCC you should be able to set the fan speed at a steady 30% rather than have it fluctuate up and down. That may sort your noise issues.

I take it you play games on your HTPC?

If not then I would suggest looking into a new mobo that has decent onboard graphics.
I currently have an AM2 780G chipset which decodes blu-ray nicely and covers everything I need in the HTPC. It even plays casual games at a push.
Not sure about Nvidia's equivalent chipset for socket 775, but I know there is one.
 
I do play games, but a the moment its not really that much, so I've actually been thinking about switching to on board graphics when I know I'm not going to be gaming for a day or two, but that seems a ball ache, and I've also put a bit of time into getting refresh rates and colour levels right in CCC, and I'm too lazy to sort it out for the on onboard graphics.

So I'm thinking of something a bit less powerful, or maybe I leave it and just accept that I won't have to turn the heating on this winter.
 
The HD4770 is the only 40nm card out there at the moment and it's very frugle on power consumption while still being a powerful card.

Alternatively do what I'm doing and wait until the 10th September for the new ATI 5xxx cards. These are all going to be 40nm cards, and then pick from a midrange model in that series. Chances are it will be powerful and have 1024Mb RAM like your current HD4870, but will be far more efficient and run cooler like the HD4770's.
 
Thanks stonedofmoo, I didn't realise the 5xxx cards were so close to being released. I think I'll wait a little while then and grab one of them.
thanks
 
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