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Cooling a AMD 4850 video card

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pcsavvy

Senior member
My card has been running hot ever since I got it. So exploring previous posts, I found a suggestion of taking off the cooler and putting new and better thermal paste on and dusting it real well.
So last night, I took the cooler off the GPU and man, they must have put a big blob of thermal paste on the heat sink. It was so thick and spread onto the green surrounding the GPU. So gently and carefully I cleaned off the old thermal paste with 97% rubbing alcohol and qtips. It was a bit of work getting all that goop off.
I made sure to air dust the card and cooler, put a small bead of arctic silver and put everything back together.
The card seems to run a little bit better but you can still fry an egg on that card. I was wondering if it would be wise to have a fan blowing air directly onto the card or to replace the cooler itself with a third party cooler?
 
A cooler chip is a healthier chip, so I would go with a third party cooler. I actually don't know too many aftermarket VGA coolers 😛. Scythe Setsugen if it fits?
 
How hot is hot? You need to post a temperature.

My 4870 idles at 50C and max loads at 80C. Even at idle you can't touch the heat pipes coming off the card cause they'll burn flesh. These are completely normal temps for the 48xx series.

My new case (PCK62) must have better airflow configuration than my old CM690 that had a side fan blowing directly on the vid card because now my vid card idles at 47C. My CM690 had a side fan and a bottom mounted fan both blowing onto the vid card and it still idled at 50C.
 
I thought all the 4850's with reference coolers ran really hot?

Something that helped me on my 4870 was rigging up a 120mm fan to blow across the entire graphics card. The heatsink on the dk edition doesn't have a shroud but my temps dropped about 4c with a really slow fan 🙂

Back when i had a 7900gt using a small desk fan to blow into my case would drop temps a huge amount !
 
Post temps. My 4890 will hit 90c under a heavy gaming load, its got a bit of a OC on it though and still uses the stock(which is not good) cooler but with better paste, i did the same thing you did and replaced the stock crap. But still right now typing this its downlocked to 240Mhz and running at 55C, the stock fan is only spinning at 10% though, about the only time its quiet.

Im thinking of putting a AC S1 on it, i believe that also fits a 4850. I figure that with a slow 120mm fan zap strapped to it will provide alot better cooling if i can find a good way to cool the VRMs.
 
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