With the recent launch of the new HD4800 series, AMD/ATI have taken the video card market by storm with two extremely powerful and great value cards. Seeing as nearly everyone has now adopted one of these babies, i thought it would be good to throw together a quick guide to getting the most out of them.
I currently own two HD4850s which are successfully running in crossfire. This guide will focus primarily on the 4850 where we will take a look at the stock cooling, volt modding, and conquering the heat.
First up... Some inspirational music... :)
It's been scientifically proven that listening to Nevermore automatically adds 100mhz + to your maximum overclock... something like that...
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Here's a look at the 4850 working hard in my rig. We can all see the obvious design flaw here - a single slot cooler! Hopefully the name brands will have custom solutions out soon enough.
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After taking the hsf off the 4850, we can tear her apart and have a closer look.
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This is whats under the red plastic. Notice how the fins are covered to create a wind tunnel. Also note the sad size of the fan. It's a noisy little bugger at high speed and can be a real pain if you have an open rig without a case. I do like the mosfet cooling however - we will be recycling this later when we move to water.
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A shot of the underside of the heatsink. Standard mounting holes which will make fitting aftermarket heatsinks and waterblocks a breeze. However all the folks that like their full cover waterblocks will need to buy a new one which is compatible with the 4850.
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Here's a closer look at the fin design. ATI really should have opted for some kind of dual slot cooler on this one. Some users are reporting load temperatures of 100 degrees or more. Personally i have found that after installing a 120mm low rpm fan over the two cards, i managed to receive load temperatures of around 60 degrees which is quite acceptable by anyones standards.
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Now we can take a look at the card in all its naked glory.
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Hmmm better clean that gpu... ahhh metho!
All cleaned up :)
Pretty huh?
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A closer look. This little baby puts out more than her fair share of heat.
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I think you may have noticed by now that my photography is quite poor. Here's a final shot of the power section. The 4850 only uses 1 x 6pin pcie connector while the 4870 uses 2. The mosfets will really heat up when we start cranking the volts so we will have to cool these suckers too.
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That's all for now. Hopefully we're all a little more familiar with the card and we can move on to some volt modding.
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