So I had in my hands a Powercolor HD 4850 card for about a week now. After messing with it I felt a bit annoyed at the temperature the card was giving me, a solid 81C.
So off I went and ordered some Tuniq TX-2 and see if it was true; that the factory applied thermal compound on these reference cards was really crap.
So after unscrewing like 2000 screws I got the heatsink off, cleaned up the old boy and put on a fresh coat of paint.
Nutz on a horse. The damn temperature was still at 81C. Which leads me to believe that either: a. the card thinks that as long as the temp doesn't kiss 90C it doesn't need to reve up the fan or b. this is the best the reference heatsink and fan can do.
Naturally, I was hoping for A but knowning my luck it be B.
Anyways, install Vista Ultimate 64bit. Latest drivers and all. Slapped in some benchmarks for fun.
My Specs:
The temperatures and fan speeds before the benchmarking and after.
Vantage High Setting Score.
Devil May Cry 4 settings and score. Lowest FPS 70.33.
Call Of Duty 4, multiplayer timedemo, Bog. Average FPS 66.46 no VSync.
Temperature of the 4850 after thermal paste application:
Bootup:
Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark run:
5 minutes after run:
Using the Hotfix driver, Auto-Tune and Test:
Here is a bit of the Devil May Cry Benchmark.
