2009-06-03 20:52:55
Cooling down a Ati Radeon 4850x2
I finally managed to get some money together to buy two Thermalright V2 vga coolers for my Sapphire 4850x2. As some of you might know from experience or from reading forums you've definitely heard that this card is the loudest you can find on the market. The cooling design does suck and is inadequate for the card, at least that's what I believe is the reason for it being so loud.
As a student i didn't really have that much spare money so after some saving up i got two of the VGA coolers I believed would be the best for the card and would actually fit next to each other. I've seen two different versions on how to customize cooling for this card as there are no readymade aftermarket coolers for this card.
The first modification I found for this card used two Zalman VF900-cu coolers which aren’t the best ones out there in terms of cooling performance. The other one I found used one Thermalright V2 and one Thermalright HR-03 vga cooler. This one was pretty exotic and wasn’t really for my taste although the HR-03 does offer better cooling performance.
4850x2 cooled with two VF900-cu coolers
4850x2 cooled with Thermalright V2 and HR03 – Full article found here Circuitmonkey
Anyhow I decided to go my own way as I did some studying and found that the Zalman VF900-cu coolers were 0.4mm wider than the Thermalright ones. Also the Thermalright V2 coolers do better according to tests. The tricky part was to get them to fit as the 4850x2 card has one chip in-between the gpu:s. Now if someone goes and does this same thing with his card, don’t blame me if you break it down ;-)
First off to actually get the card open you would have to open the black casing which is held together with 8 screws that can be found on top of the card. After this you will have access to the stock coolers themselves. To be able to remove them you have to unscrew 8 screws found on the back side of the card.
The tricky part as I did mention before was getting the Thermalright coolers to fit. They fit perfectly when width and height is taken in to account. The problem that arises is that the grill found in the middle is too high and would render the Thermalright coolers useless as they wouldn’t touch the whole gpu chip. I did use a pair of cutters and took away roughly 2mm which did result in the new coolers to fit perfectly.
I used two xilence 80x80x25mm fans, ofcourse you can use your own favorite fans but these were my choise for cooling it down and they are DEFINITELY more silent than the stock coolers!! Now you can use your own coolers/drop voltage to fit your own needs and taste but in the end this was definitely a project worth doing and I do not regret it at all.
As you can see from last picture the card gets really heavy and starts to bend at the end. I used some cable ties to tie the end of the card to tie it to the 5.25” bay. There might some more elegant and better looking solutions for this but this was sufficient for me atm. Now you might wonder about the temperature of the card? Well I forgot to take screenshots of the gpu-z temps before taking away the stock cooling of the card and therefore I don’t have any temperature to measure. But then again if you do have the same card you can measure it and compare it to my results after the project.
| Thermalright V2 | 28€ (inc. shipping) |
| Thermalright V2 | 38€ (no shipping) |
| 2 Xilence 80x80x25 fans | 12.80€ (no shipping) |
| Total Price: | 78,80€ |
Comments: 3
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2010-03-06 12:15:48 by: PH
Hi
Good mod but there is a part which I dont understand about using some kinda cutter/cutting. Could u tell em what did you cut down?
thx
Addition
2009-08-02 21:32:04 by: Zimeon
Just as a sidenote that ive been using Folding @ Home for the past moth with the card and its temperature has never gone over 70c even with low fan speeds. So if your still thinking if you should do a similar kind of modification its safe 
Obviously you still have to be carefull when you do it!!
Cutting
2010-07-01 20:23:51 by: Zimeon
Hey the cutting part refers to the grill in the middle between the two GPUs and as the thermalright V2 coolers dont have enough space it wont fit without trimming the grill in between.
So in other words some height needs to be cut on the grill. Hope this helps
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