Hi.
Just thought I'd resurrect this thread as I've had the above mentioned card for about 4-5 months now and have a few things to mention about it, some of which may be of interest to you if you have encountered the same problems I have.
My card: Sapphire HD4850 X2 1GB
Other components: AMD 6400+ Black edition dual core 3.2GHZ
2GB corsair DDR2
Asrock Alive Xfire mainboard (single gfx card installed)
Zalman reserator 1v2 water cooling for CPU and northbridge + mods and bits n bobs attached
*******Bending PCB******
Firslty, the bending under it's own weight thing.... yeah, I have that. I've come up with a totally gash solution, which is to use the power cable loop which connects the two connectors on the card to the PSU (both are on the same rail) to brace that end of the board off the bottom of the case, which works alright. It seems to bend only so far and just stay like that, and it still works so meh. Anyone who has a pentium 4 LG774 or whatever its called and has changed it's heatsink will know that bending PCB's doesn't mean they break..... much lol!!
********Noise********
This irritated the crap out of me to begin with, as the fans would be near silent then ramp straight up to 100% as soon as they were under load, occasionally drowining out my speakers if late at night. The best solution to this (other than an aftermarket cooler, which I'll get to in a mo) is to flash both GFX card BIOSes and set the fan speeds for each temp yourself.
This thread has the details for anyone brave enough to try it - the first comment here:
http://www.geeks3d.com/20081114/sapphire-radeon-hd-4850-x2-with-a-perfect-gpu-cooler-not-really/
- I did it as described there, and have had absolutely no issues yet at all. I saved the original BIOS just incase.
Secondly, if your feeling even more brave and have a small phillips screwdriver, you can take the black aluminium shroud off the card pretty easily by unscrewing the 8 small screws holding it onto the heatsink. These are located on the top (or bottom, depending on your outlook ;P ) of the card, around the fans. Doing this quietened it down a bit, and also aided in cooling - more on that to follow.
********Cooling********
The most extensive of my efforts so far.... or atleast it soon will be.
This was a massive problem for me, firstly because of the way I had lately rearranged my watercooling system (which I now know to be utterly silly lol) and secondly due to my small midi tower case. Because of this card, my CPU routinely overheated and as my cooling is (mostly) passive, I had to power off and cool down the coolant before playing Farcry2 again.
There are a couple of things you can do to stop this emitting so much heat.... one or two small things, and one very big thing, all of which I'll cover.
**Removing the shroud**
This seems to have helped the case temp. I have no hard data to back this up, as I lack thermometers / time / energy to measure it, but my CPU has stopped overheating (although I have also corrected the sillyness inherent in my watercooling loop). Taking the shroud off opens up the fans on all sides, and allows greater airflow around the heatsinks. Although it should also be noted that this means your HD4850 will be spraying hot air ALL OVER your case rather than being restricted by the shroud.
**Moving the card**
If you are lucky enough to own an MB with 2 PCIE graphics slots - (crossfire or even an SLI board I think) - you may be able to move the card down to the bottom slot. This puts a little more distance between your gfx card and the other major heatsources - RAM, CPU and PSU. Atleast on my board this is true, I have seen some wierd configs for boards lately so this might not help you.
**Fans**
Sounds like a no-brainer, but a couple of extractor fans or one of those PCI slot fans from akasa will help ALOT. My main issue was the heat wafting up from the reverse side of the board, where there were no heatsinks or fans to cool it, and this hot air just hanging around and heating up my waterpipes. 2 80mm fans and a PCI slot fan directly above the gfx card almost eliminate this problem entirely.
"but", I hear you cry, "this just makes more noise!!!" This is true, they do. Unless you, like me, enjoy playing with resistors and / or making gash mods to your wires. A normal case fan (connects to a 3 pin connector on the MB) can be easily repurposed to be a very slow spinning (read: silent) fan with just 3 easy steps.
1. Cut off 3 pin connector from the wire
2. get a spare 4 pin molex connector
3. splice the red wire on the fan to the red on the molex, and the black to one of the blacks.
This gives you a slow spinning fan which moves air at a nice pace nonetheless.
Do that at your own risk. Even though my system hasn't exploded or caught fire, that's not to say my hacks won't cause it to in the future.... same goes for yours.
You can do a similar thing to a PCI slot fan... try putting a resitor inline on the red wire, that should slow it down a bit. Infact you could do exactly the same for the case fans, but I haven't tried it that way yet lol
**Extremities**
The third cooling solution for this card has yet to be delivered. A word of warning before you click "BUY" however, I have no idea if this will even fit the 4850. I got it as it used to be about £60 so £23 is one hell of a saving.
I will post again (maybe even with pics!!) if installation is successful.
See here:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Coolermaster-Aquagate-Duo-Viva-Liquid-VGA-cooling-%28supports-Sli-and-Crossfire%29
This is a more extreme solution, but if the waterblocks fit, it could almost have been designed specifically for this card (2 years in advance lmao).
The main reason I want to try this solution is firstly, as you may have guessed, I really like liquid cooling. My reasons for this are that its more efficient, and instead of having fast running fans you have fewer slower running fans, making for a much quieter pc, and less wind-tunnel effect. Although it is generally very expensive, getting a stand-alone cooling solution for that price is just epic. I mean the same kind of (decent) thing for cooling a CPU is upwards of £90.
Would be great if you had 2 single core cards in xfire or sli too. But read some reviews before you buy, I hear this thing is bulky.
The second, more important reason, is that right now this card spews hot air like a UK politian, all around the inside of my case, heating it up. One of my upcoming upgrades is a new 80mm radiator to be mounted internally, so I want cooler air inside the case as I might be exhausting this through the radiator, even if not it will still have an effect on the liquid's temperature.
This solution looks to me like it will take the heat from the card and expel it through the vent in it's PCI bracket. So, no more hot air heating up the rest of my components! I'm looking forward to this.
I used to use the Reserator to cool my VGA card aswell as northbridge and cpu, back in the day when components werent that hot, and a GFX card with a fan was one that you paid alot extra for. Things have moved fast.... I mean I'm not very old lol.
It managed this completely passively with no extra kit.... but as I've upgraded things over the years it became unable to deal with all of it at once, and then unable to work passively, so took out the VGA block and northbridge block (recently) and added a reservoir, extra pump, extra passive radiator and a fan to the reserator itself. and even that got overheated by this one beast of a card. I also just found out what I owe the leccy company, I'm beginning to wonder if this card should come with "may replace central heating, inflate energy bill" label attached to the box.
Hope this is of use to anyone whos experienced these issues.
Thanks
Alan
p.s has anyone noticed squealing seemingly coming from this card when playing games? more noticeable in game intros - try watching the wither intro vid if you have it, you'll see what I mean. I have a fix for this too, but will refrain on posting till i've tried it.
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