How to get a cooler Radeon HD 4870 with manual fan speed control

Posted at: Wednesday 24th September 2008

Want a cooler running Radeon HD 4850, 4870, or 4870X2? Orestis Bastounis shows you a neat way to manually specify its fan speed.

ATI’s Radeon HD 4800-series graphics cards have been a big success for the company, and deservedly so - they've devilered excellent performance for very competetive prices. If you’ve bought one, you’re probably not disappointed.

However, all the 4800-series cards operate at high temperatures, particularly the HD 4870 and HD 4870X2. If you hover over the ATI Overdrive option in the Catalyst Control Center (CCC), you’ll see how hot the GPU is. Even at idle, 79C isn't uncommon for a HD 4870. You might think the only way to reduce this temperature is by purchasing a third-party cooler, as currently there’s no option to increase the fan speed in the ATI Driver. However, with a handy hack – just editing an XML file in notepad - you can bring the temperature right down to earth.

This fix is very simple, takes no more than a second, and doesn’t even require a reboot. It wasn’t discovered by us, and has been reported on numerous forums

STEP 1 Start by bringing up Catalyst Control Center in advanced mode and open the ATI Overdrive menu. In our example, we have a single HD4870 running at stock speed and currently idling at 77C. Before you can make any changes you need to unlock the ATI Overdrive settings, or any changes you make to the fan speed will be overwritten by the factory settings.

STEP 2 You must create profiles to allow you to select different performance modes. Open the Profiles Manager, type a name into the box at the top and save it to create a profile. We’re using two profiles: one for the default fan speeds and one for fast fan speeds. Make sure both are saved, then close the window.

STEP 3 To make the adjustment to the fan speed, you need to open the XML file associated with your newly-created profile. This file can be found in an ATI settings folder your user directory. On Windows Vista, this path is usually:

C:UsersYOURNAMEAppDataLocalATIACE

In this directory will be another folder called Profiles. In there will be an XML file for each profile you have created. Open Fast.XML in notepad. There are two lines to edit that will allow you to adjust the fan speed of your graphics card.

The first is:

To allow manual adjustments of the fan speed, change Automatic to Manual.

Then you need to adjust the speed of the fan itself. There are two lines that allow you to adjust your fan speed: