XFX GTX 280 XXX and MSI HD 4870: not only overclocking
Heating MSI HD 4870, control over the fan speed and overclocking
The tests have shown that MSI HD 4870 heats up not so immensely as the formerly tested HIS HD 4870, even despite the factory overclocking from 750/3600 MHz to 780/4000 MHz. That was caused by the higher rotational speed of the fan in the cooling system. During the idle time, the fan of MSI HD 4870 is rotating at 1530 RPM, sometimes accelerating to 1934 RPM, while in the formerly examined HIS HD 4870 it was rotating at 1075 RPM. If we measure the fan's speed as percentage of its maximum possible speed, then during the idle time it went up from 22% to 27-31%. As a result, the temperature of the GPU in the 2D mode dropped from 78 to 64 C. There is a difference in heating between MSI HD 4870 and HIS HD 4870 under load as well. While running nine consecutive tests Firefly Forest from the benchmarking suite 3DMark'06 at 1600õ1200 with the 4X FSAA and 16X AF enabled, MSI HD 4870 heated up to 74 C, the fan's speed was about 2625 RPM (or 40% of the maximum possible speed), while HIS HD 4870 under similar conditions heated up to 84 C with the fan's rotational speed being 1886 RPM (or 30% of the maximum).
The increased speed of the fan is not a credit of the new drivers Catalyst 8.7. Even with new drivers, HIS HD 4870 heated up to 80 during the idle time. That means the cause is in the modified firmware of the MSI video card and not in the new drivers. Due to this modification, MSI HD 4870 turned somehow "louder" than its reference "sisters", but that has affected its temperature performance. If you like this modification, here is the BIOS from MSI HD 4870. For your convenience, we included the ATI Flash 3.60 utility into the archive, so you only have to find a DOS bootable floppy. However, the rotational speed of the fan can be controlled with not only the firmware, but also with Catalyst drivers.
Creating a profile in CCC.
To this end, you should enable the "ATI Overdrive" feature in the video card's control panel and create a profile through adding only the "ATI Overdrive" settings into it, as is shown in the figure. Then, go to the folder C:UsersProfile nameAppDataLocalATIACEProfiles, if you use Windows Vista, or to the folder C:Documents and SettingsProfile nameLocal SettingsApplication DataATIACEProfiles, if you are a user of Windows XP. In this folder, save the profile file created, which should be amended with a text editor; the best tool for that is the "Notepad".
Editing the profile file.
Looking for the highlighted part of the text and change the string "Automatic" with "Manual", with the number at the very end of the highlighted part of the text used to set the desired rotational speed of the fan in percents. However, such a trick not only allows dropping about 10-20 degrees thus giving up the quietness, but is fraught with a danger. The thing is, the manually set speed of the fan will not be dynamically adjustable depending on the load upon the video card. It is easy to guess that is the fan rotates at insufficient speed, the video card may overheat and damage.
If you want to overclock the video card and thus raise the speed of the fan, you will be disappointed. You can control the rotational speed of the video card through drivers only with the ATI Overdrive feature enabled. But once you start up the only available utility for overclocking the most recent video cards Radeon HD 48x0 - AMD GPU Clock Tool - and change the clock speeds, the ATI Overdrive feature gets immediately disabled, and the fan's control system switches to the automatic mode.
AMD GPU Clock disables ATI Overdrive.
Therefore, while "overclocking" we cooled the video card with an additional 120-mm fan. The vide card overcame 820 MHz for the GPU and 4600 MHz for the video memory. Therefore, we were able to "overclock" the video card even more than the manufacturer could do that.
XFX GTX 280 XXX is also factory-overclocked - to the maximum. From the recommended 601/1296 MHz for the graphic processor and 2214 MHz for the video memory, the XFX video card has been overclocked to 669/1458 and 2484 MHz for the GPU and the video memory, respectively. Further attempts to overclock failed. That is no wonder, because frequencies set by XFX for XFX GTX 280 XXX are high enough for such video cards of the GeForce GTX 280 series.
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