Temperature

When someone is describing the 4870's to you and they say, "it's smokin' ", you may want to ask them to clarify because they may not be talking about the speed.  Just sitting here typing this article the video card temps are hovering close to 80C and I'm not in a warm room either.  The ambient temperature in this room is 22C/72F.  Playing a game for a little while pushes the temps up to the 90C range.  The thing is I haven't heard the fans RPM increase during game play.  Like I said earlier, there is no where to manually increase the speed of the fan in the Catalyst control panel, but here's how you can fix that.  First you need to create a profile in the Catalyst Control Panel.  That profile will generate a .XML file that you can edit.  Just open the "profile name".xml in notepad.  Here's what you are looking for and what you will need to change:

<Feature name="FanSpeedAlgorithm_0">
<Property name="FanSpeedAlgorithm" value="Automatic" />

Change the Automatic to Manual.  Next...

<Feature name="FanSpeedPercentTarget_0">
<Property name="Want" value="23" />

Change the value to your desired fan RPM. 

Here's the cool part.  In the Catalyst Control Panel, you can set the profile up to create a shortcut on your desktop.  I have three profiles on my desktop; Normal, Fan50 and Fan100.  You can probably guess what each one does.  But, a simple double-click and the fan ramps up to whatever RPM you have set it to.  Double-clicking on the Fan100 profile, increases the noise quite a bit, but the idle temp drops from 80C to 50C in just a matter of a seconds.  Remember, if you have two cards installed, there will be two settings to change. 

Update: After our HD4850 review we were sent a new video card BIOS that was suppose to help lower the temperatures of the GPU. However, at the time of this review there was no such update for this particular video card, but you may want to keep an eye out.

Conclusion:

The HD4870 is an impressive piece of hardware.  It easily stomps all over the 9800GTX in all but the Crysis benchmark.  I think it's safe to say that AMD has the $300 video card market wrapped up with the release of the 4870.  What makes this even more impressive is they are doing this with very immature drivers.  Once AMD gets the kinks ironed out of the drivers, the whole experience is going to be a lot better.  Overall it's hard to go wrong with this card.  You're getting high-end performance at a mid-range price.  Club Overclocker Recommended!

Page 1: Intro Page 2: Specs & Features Page 3: The Bundle & Layout Page 4: Overclocking Page 5: Benchmarks Page 6: Games Page 7: High Quality Benches Page 8: Conclusion