I read a lot of reviews about vga coolers lately but cant decide what is best for 4870 ! I run the card at 825-850 MHz for the GPU and the memory is at 1000-1100 MHz. Temperatures are pretty high and the stock fan spinning up is killing my ears Please post what gpu cooler you are using for your 4870/4890 OCed. (I would be interested in a complete KIT that means VRM and Memory cooling also in the box - dont want to get a lot of parts) Current temps running FurMark 1.7: Temps not annoy me but the FAN is
I got to say i completely understand you, i had the same problem with my Sapphire 4890, the PCB design is the same, so if a cooler fits the 4870 it will fit the 4890 as long as they are reference designs, back when i had my 4890 Sapphire i installed an accelero Twin Turbo on it and it worked like a charm, you cant even hear the fan at 100% and it cools the GPU considerably a lot more than the reference fan without the jet noise. Its pretty decent cooler and its cheap. So if i were you i would go for 2 choices. 1 Artic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo or 2 Scythe Musashi They are both espectacular coolers for the card, and it will for sure solve your noise problem and help you reduce your temperatures. They both come with accesories to cool VRM's and RAM chips, but, you could do like i did with my 4890 and keep the stock backplate on for VRM and RAM chips while the coolers from any of the 2 i told you will be blowing air directly to the backplate cooling GPU, VRM and ram properly. Its far more efficient than the stock cooler and its completely noise free compared to it. Another tip, make sure to have a proper airflow in your case because those 2 reference coolers do not blow the hot air outside, they keep it inside the case so make sure you got good airflow to exhaust all the hot air. Maybe 1 or 2 lateral coolers blowing to the card and 1 or 2 back or rear coolers exhausting the hot air out. I post some pictures of what i did with mine i hope it can help you and if you got any questions shoot. The card taken all apart. ( yes i know its a lot of thermal paste i did not used that much i properly cleaned it and added some AC thermal paste ) The card with only the reference backplate on as you can see it covers VRM and RAM chips perfectly. The accelero Twin Turbo and its accesories. The card and the accelero installed. Again from another view
DuOrb Extreme XBit review of the DuOrb Extreme Seems the DuOrb is a pretty good cooler and I'll get one for the Sapphire 4870 I have here if I ever get my hands on one of these coolers. The VRM cooler is pretty pathetic, it seems, but the rest is good. I have a DuOrb cooler on the XFX 8800GTS 320 I passed down and it's very, very nice. It's really cool but due to me not caring to mod the video card I can't go over 650/1000, but that has, obviously, nothing to do with the cooler.
Thanks a lot Nemesis for the good idea for cooling VRMs and MEM Thanks Liranan also (I was at the same speed with G80 650 or so without VGPU mod you cant go higher ...)
The only bad thing about stock coolers is that their centrifugal fan is very noisy at high RPM ... They are well made also and have heatpipes and real copper on them ... I had an unpleasant experience with Thermaltake and with ASUS with coolers and ramsinks that were advertised as full copper and they were aluminium coated with a thin copper layer ... Anyway maybe things have changed recently
One thing I hate about Thermaltake: "We couldn’t use the original Thermaltake heatsinks for VRM and video memory chips because their sticky layer was so weak that they didn’t hold on any of these chips and were falling off all the time. Moreover, we were pretty concerned with their efficiency considering how small they actually were ..." That was a quote from XBit review of the DuOrb Extreme but it also happened to me with a GPU watercooling block ... Allways have to make a thermal compound mixture with some glue in order to fix them and they become very hard to be removed later ... I have a Radeon 4850 with ramsinks glued like that and I dont think I will ever get them down ...
The best 4870 cooler is actually a stock one: The VaporX cooler used on Sapphire cards, I have one and it keeps my 4870 at a nice cool 25c at idle and never above 75c under full load under Furmark or OCCT. That in conjunction with a case with good ventilation I've got an Antec 900.
i got my 4870 512 setup with the stock cooler plate over the VRM's and ram and an AC accelero S1 on the gpu. on the S1 i mounted 2x120mm fans. during summer it would reach ~70c, now i load in the mid 50's.
