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Catalyst 8.10 brings fan control to Radeon HD 4000 cards
Stop your GPU from getting ridiculously hot, without any messing around with XML files
AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 might be the fastest graphics card out there at the moment, but it can also get mightily toasty, as can the single-GPU Radeon HD 4870 and single-slot 4850. In fact, even when idle, these GPUs can often hit temperatures of 79°C. The best way around this is, of course, to increase the fan speed, and AMD has now introduced a user-friendly fan speed control in its Catalyst 8.10 driver to make easy work of this.
This was previously possible using apps such as RivaTuner, or even by editing an XML file, but it’s good to see that AMD has decided to make the process as easy and accessible as possible. The new driver also promises up to a 15 per cent performance improvement in Unreal Tournament III on Radeon HD 4000 and 3800-series cards.
You can download Catalyst 8.10 from here, and the new fan control can be found in the Overdrive section of the Catalyst Control Center in Advanced mode. You just need to unlock Overdrive, tick the box that says Enable Manual Fan Control and then adjust the slider according to how fast you want the fan to spin up. To get an idea of the amount of noise it will make, as well as the temperature reduction, click on the Test Custom Clocks button and the card will test the new fan speed, as well as the clock speeds, while showing you the GPU temperature.
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Has anybody, anywhere, at anytime heard of anyone having a problem the temperatures that these cards reach? True the fan control is handy if you're oc'ing the card but that aside I have yet to understand why people have been so bothered about the temps.
Comment by adidan at 5:06pm 19th October 2008
It seems that ATI are being a bit funny about all us AGP users, for the last two iterations of the catalyst updates we have had to wait for an emergency hotfix so that we can update, it will be interesing to see if we get the fan hotfix inthe same way as the PCI users
Comment by welshguardsman at 12:22pm 17th October 2008
By unlocking Overdrive on our cards, does this mean we lose our warranties?
Comment by CSQuake at 3:01pm 16th October 2008
so I no longer have to mess about with the XML files to manually adjust the speed, which is good. Also, response to end user demand for features is always a good thing. What I'd really like to know though is how I could change the auto profile, I would like to be able to have the fan running quiet most of the time but just change the threshold where it starts to speed up.
Comment by mightysi at 2:11pm 16th October 2008
@CPC_RedDawn Yea the BETA has been out for a bit but not the final version, there's a difference!
Comment by Drake28 at 12:51pm 16th October 2008
8.11 rc1 just popped up on guru3d if anyones interested...
Comment by philheckler at 12:06pm 16th October 2008
About time for the fan speed as 80 deg c was just plain silly. Never noticed anything more than 100% on the gpu activity.
Comment by hay00c2 at 11:44am 16th October 2008
CPC this is old news. The Beta of 8.10 has been out for ages, are we getting slow in our old age? :P lol and the GPU activity bug is well known and I too get 524% activity until I enter a 3D game. I don't think that this is one of the top priority bugs to fix as it does not effect game performance what so ever where as immense heat can effect performance so including fan control and fixing game bugs and performance improvements are higher on ATI's list. But don't worry it should be fixed soon.
Comment by CPC_RedDawn at 11:37am 16th October 2008
About time they sorted this out although a massive pain in the ass is how the gpu activity hits mega hights on startup until you start a 3d app! Mine hits 524%
Comment by mr2mk2lad at 11:33am 16th October 2008
Sorry, Custom PC comments are now closed.
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