Please help to choose a cool ATI card

If you still want good gaming performance then your only real choice is the HD 4770.




http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/v [...] html#sect0


The 9600GT is a little cooler, but is also outclassed by the HD 4770. On average the HD 4770 is about 6% - 7% slower than a HD 4850.

XFX has an interesting version of the ATI HD Radeon 4770 graphics card that exhausts hot air out a rear panel slot:

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSear [...] ia=3005196

Tom's Hardware did a feature article about using two 4770's in Crossfire mode:

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2288.html

People are way to scared about temps these days. On many forums people are screaming that they are scared their cpu's will melt at 67c. The temps are fine on the 4850 and won't hurt anything. Yes they will raise case temps but if your not into serious overclocking that doesn't make a few differnce unless you have really really crappy airflow.

Anyways if you are worried about temps then get the Vapor-x 4850 or the 4770 that is your only real choice for no temps. OR you can get the normal 4850 and put the Aero turbo cooler fan on it which will not only lower temps by a huge amount but also run quieter.

If you can wait until September 10, maybe you can swap directly to Radeon HD 5850 or Radeon HD 5870 which are going to be much more cooler than the current Radeon HD 4000 series and without having to miss DirectX 11 too...

Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 are kinda hot and if you turn the fan too high then it would become noisy so I think that the best option for you is to wait for DX 11 video cards in September which would run cooler with 40nm GPU that consume lesser power and also having better cooler that perhaps ATI has never tried before.

yeah that is like the 4850 x2 has that great cooler on it and runs far cooler then just a standard 4850.

4870 running hot? Get a Vapor-X model they are overclocked from the factory and run around 65c at load.

Also don't forget an all copper aftermarket heatsink and fan are only about 20-30 bucks and will bring temps down really low while being quieter.

You aren't getting much cooler cards with the 5XXX. They have smaller dies but they also have much higher core and memory clocks so unless the cooling as been improved you likely are still going to get just under 4870 temps.