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How to get a cooler Radeon HD 4870 with manual fan speed control
Want a cooler running Radeon HD 4850, 4870, or 4870X2? Orestis Bastounis shows you a neat way to manually specify its fan speed.
By increasing the value, you’ll increase the speed of your card’s fan. The fan speed you want involves balancing noise output vs. temperature reduction. Setting it to 100 per cent will certainly cool your GPU, but will make the card's cooler extremely noisy - more than most people can tolerate. Even a small increase will significantly reduce your GPU temperature, and the difference will be barely audible if your PC is noisy anyway.
We set the fan to 40 per cent. The extra noise at this speed is definitely noticeable, but the HD 4870 is quieter than many other graphics cards at its default fan speed. This means that with the fan speed set to 40 per cent, its noise levels are no more than many other GPUs. However, increasing the fan speed meant the idle temperature dropped a whopping 30C.
It would be obviously be ideal if ATI would allow users to directly adjust the fan speed in the CCC. Many users are under the impression that the high temperature of their card is a tricky problem to fix. Including the option to adjust it manually would have at least offered users the choice of either a noisy, cool GPU or running it quieter and hotter.
