My HD 4870 is too NOISY.... WHY??

That's because you upped the fan speed. 4870 runs hot. It's a fact of life.
http://en.expreview.com/2008/06/24/first-review-hd-4870...

wow dagger mr NVIDIA fan boi.

Just manual set ur 4870 to 30 %. U can barely hear the fan at that speed and it keepts the card cool at 58 C

Don't use Smartdoctor or any other crappy tools you get included with your card. Can't you set the fan speed to automatic in the Catalyst control panel? If you can't use a third party tool like Rivatuner (if it already supports HD 4870) to set your fan speed to 35-40%. Watch the temps though when playing a gfx intensive game. If they get extremely high like 100°C or more at the fan speed mentioned above, something must be wrong with the stock thermal compound. You can then try to replace it with something better.

Even if it hits 100C, nothing's wrong. It's a different card. You can't compare it to a 8800gts that runs 60C max load, but starts to produce artifacts at 80C. That temperature is typical for 4870 which has been known to run at 100C without artifacting. The chip's high energy leakage comes hand in hand with high heat tolerance. It's a different artichtecture. If you can't see artifacts, leave it alone.

I'm very sorry dagger I don't have more expertise on ATI cards.  

All I want to say is that it is not normal that his card fan has to run at 80% to keep it cool. If you know so much about ATI cards, tell him then what the thermal threshold for a HD 4870 is so he can keep an eye on temps when gaming after he lowered the fan speed.

Edit: Maybe get some extra knowledge on Nvidia chips, because a 8800 gts G92 can get a lot hotter than 60 on stock.

I dont understand.

I have an HD 4870.

I set the fan speed to 30 %.

It reads 55 C in catalyst control center, around 63 C under load

Whats with all this bull **** nvda fanboism. Do u guys have a card? Know what your talking about? The card doesnt run 'hot' and actually runs much cooler than the gtx 280 which loads at 85 C

Benchmarkers stress test. They don't consider 10% load while playing something like WoW "under load."
This is a decent stress tester. Run it in Stress mode for at least 15 minutes, in standard settings (standard resolution, no aa, no af). It has to be standard initial settings, otherwise memory bus bandwidth bottlenecks with aa/af on, preventing full stress.
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/

I dont play WoW.

I play cod 4, crysis and Grid.

I have also dont synthetic stress testing on it for an hour.

Ive never seen my card go over 68 c on any game / any test with a mere 30 % fan setting.

Do you have a wayitsmeanttobeplayed stick up your ass?

samthegray, ignore dagger. He's only talking about things that have nothing to do with your problem. See if you can get the same temps as fugben with 30% fan speed. If not, just return the card or replace the TIM (voids your warranty if your retailer finds out)

OP: Disable or uninstall ANY other software that will change the fan speed and then folow the instructions here:

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=61906

Set your fan to about 35 percent and retest.

These cards DO run hot and the fan IS noisy over 35 percent (and it is hardly silent at that setting).
Unless it is faulty, it should not need 80 percent fan speed to keep cool,
but even 90 degrees celcius is still safe.
Keep us posted.

lol i have had both cards...sapphire ati 4870 and bfg gtx 260...the 4870 stock is very very quiet but i hooked mine up to a fan controller and i know it can get extremely loud and high pitched at 80% but cools extremely good....also my fan controller was 12v so it could be giving the fan a lot more juice then expected; and i also think that is what happend......on the other hand the gtx 260 is also very noisy at 90%...in the end both cards run very quite in the 30% to 40 % range.....try hooking up your vga's cooling system with a fan controller, sometimes you can get a lot of overclocking headroom that way. my 4870 used to hit 81-88 under load at 30% fan but it started hitting around 44-48 @ 830/1250MHz with my fan controller set @ 70%...........i used the amd overclocking software for the overclock not the default drivers

one more thing...the ati 4870 is very quiet at default settings....but if your fan is loud and is making HIGH PITCHED NOISE (note the emphasis on high pitched) then it could be a problem in your card....i noticed my card got very loud and started making a high pitched noise when it ran at 70% fan controller speed

Try that Furmark, it will go over 80C after 15 minutes with 30% fan guaranteed.

yes the card does go over 80 but it runs fine...my card used to run between 81-88 C @ 30 fan speed

I monitored my 4870 again!!
I set the smart cooling in smart doctor to : 80c--- 100%
75c---80% 65c----60% 55c-----40%
when I play crysis the fan reaches 80% for jsut 10sec then it drops back
to 60% and sometimes to 40%
the fact is, that i thought that the gpu must not go beyond 80c.
so when the fan is 60% the temps are about 50-45 under Crysis
But that is still deferent than 'fugben'
after all 60% is not that noisy if I closed my case!
and i think that i can go beyond 80c, so that's a good news.
now i can set my fan to: lower than 60%
thanks.