XFX 5850 Temps and Ram Question

[davedurg09]

HI,

I just installed my XFX Ati 5850 yesterday and used Ati Overdrive to slightly overclock it to i think its 775/1125.

So I played crysis for a while Max'd out and then exited the game and ran GPU-z straight away to check temps and it said that it was 70C, this then slowly dropped and i think it idles at around 42C so im just wondering are these normal temps or am I at risk of damaging the card.

Also at the minute I have a Q6600 which is at stock and I cant overclock as my MB sucks, my ram is:
4gb of ddr2 PC-5300 667Mhz, would i see much of a performance difference in gaming if i replaced the 4gb ram with:
4gb of ddr2 PC-8500 800MHz.

It will cost around £70-£80 to buy the ram but i just want to make sure it will actually make a difference before buying it.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[welshmousepk]

thats normal, if you are worried simply up the fan speed.

as for the RAM, the gaming improvement would be completely unnoticeable. maybe a couple of frames.

 

[vvhocare5]

70 is fine with the fan on Auto. The card still heats up during game play as you are seeing. You can lower temps by going into CCC and setting the fan manually to 50% or more. Shes a gonna make noise but thats the tradeoff for speed.

You cant really hurt the card by upping the speed sliders in CCC. There really isnt enough voltage to go much higher with stability (yes I know some people claim they get to 925+ on stock volts). But even this level of overclocking is only going to deliver a couple of frames per second - barely noticeable..

I wouldnt spend money on that RAM change - not worth it in the slightest. Save up for a new mb instead.

I would do exactly what you have done and go and play a few more games and enjoy one of the best cards out there today...

 

[davedurg09]

Ok thanks for the advice, i suppose spending the money on a new Motherboard is a better idea, although i just removed my motherboard completely for the first time to install a new CPU heatsink(zalman 9700) and it was a little scary lol.

Also trying to put the screws back to seat the MB onto the case after the cpu cooler was fitted in a mid-tower was hard to say the least lol