Radeon 4850

[Death Engineer]

Anyone else out there using this card? I just recently have been having trouble with my system rebooting randomly in various games. The ones that are more graphics intensive tend to make it happen more quickly.

I did a test with ATItool and monitored the GPU temp and it goes up to 120° C (!!!) before the system just shuts off (I assume some kind of safety protection). What kind of temps are others of you seeing with this card?

I suppose I'm in the market for an aftermarket heatsink/fan of some sort as the stock one just hasn't been that great from the get go. Any suggestions on what to look for? What have you had success with and what hasn't worked? Mine has a hard time keeping the idle temps in the 70s these days.

[JIMINATOR]

uh, that's a problem. is the fan even working at full capacity? can it be adjusted? try finding rivatool, it can run as a background task and can do hardware monitoring on the card, depending on temperature it can change the fan speed accordingly.

http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner

[Death Engineer]

The fan is functional and it does throttle. However, it just can't seem to keep the thing cool. This is apparently a common problem (THE problem really) with these cards. They are great for price/performance, but the temp thing is rough. I've gotten away with it for over a year just because I haven't been playing anything too intense (mainly TF2). Now that I'm jumping into some NFS games, it is choking big time.

[Grimmy]

Might be time to look into an after market cooler for your card. I've had to get one of these once, cause the fan quit on the card. Pretty simple to install, and worked better then the stock cooler!

[BobtheCkroach]

I have a 4850. I spend most of my time in WoW, which doesn't give it a lot of trouble, but lately I've been playing GTA 4 a lot, which is pretty resource-hungry. No trouble with restarts so far, but I might give the temp a look now, just to see what's going on.

[Death Engineer]

So I took things apart today and it turns out that there was all kinds of junk in the exhaust for the GPU fan. Tons of stuff on the blades of the fan too. I took it out and cleaned it up along with the CPU fan which had collected a nice film too. Now things are running around 65 idle, and in the 90s under load. This is much more typical. I went ahead and ordered a Thermalright HR-03-GT mostly because I want to see what it's like. With a fan it is supposed to drop the idle temps into the 40s and loads to the 60-70 range.

[ME BIGGD01]

DE, Please do not order another heatsink and fan for that card. It's just not worth it. What you should maybe looking in to doing is creating multiple profiles in the ATI utility. Create one for gaming and another for basic web browsing. With the gaming profile you want to set each configuration and enable over drive for manual fan control.

Once you do this close the app and go into the actual profile folder and edit the ini file to set fan at 60-75 or even 100%. Save file and then create shortcuts on your desktop. I think there are actual youtube videos showing exactly how to do this so give a search. The good thing about this is you can just double click the shortcuts to change it or even set a keyboard set to enable what profile you want. The autofan kinda sucks with some of these cards and is the reason I have done this before.

[Death Engineer]

Too late. I ordered it 2 weeks ago and just got around to installing it yesterday. And let me just say that the heatsink is amazing. Not terribly hard to install either.

Without a fan (as I didn't have a SATA power adapter), it took the idle temp from the 70s down to the low 50s. Under full load with the ATITool, it settled out at 89 which is a degree cooler than the stock heatsink/fan when it was running at like 80% fan speed (NOISY!).

I am considering just not hooking up a fan now as it runs fine and cools off faster now than it did with the stock cooler. Idle temps in the 50s are much more reasonable.

Being the cheap (and I mean, really cheap!) guy that I am, I did try tweaking the fan profile, but I just can't deal with the additional noise. Especially when I'm just using the desktop. Now the thing is pretty much noiseless.

Was it worth the $40 for the ThermalRight HR-GT-03? It was for me as I kind of took this on as an engineering project. I can strongly recommend ThermalRight's products to others and it was actually a fun problem to research and solve.