While I haven't had an nvidia card in awhile I'd assume RivaTuner allows you to forcibly underclock from the software similar to what ATT does for ati cards.

Thinking of applying artic silver 5 on the ram chips with a drop of artic thermal adhesive in the middle so they heatsink stick, but not permantly. Bad idea, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with higher thermal resistance than simply using a pad. You'll get air between the two componds as th...

The Vregs are rated to 130ºC, the overtemp protection kicks in at 125ºC, so yeah they're hot but should be fine as long as they're not building up heat, and Furmark is after all somewhat insane. For the GPU the overtemp is set to 104ºC unless my memory fails me. As long as you're not running heavil...

I still don't know how I tell if a board is reference or not. I might not buy the cheapest as other things such as warranty come into play, as you mentioned, but I can't really compare my choices if I don't know which boards are reference. Is Powercolor a good brand in terms of warranty, etc. If so...

So is the Powercolor a reference design and a good choice? If not, how do I find a reference design card? Seems to be a reference board with a different cooler, the standard cooler looks like this . As long as you're buying a reference card which manufacturer you go for is of little relevance unles...

Which of these two would people recommend The MSI being a non-reference design cannot be shader unlocked, and the memory speeds are just two different ways of listing the same thing, ie the memory speed of the two cards is identical. The MSI one you buy to not have to swap cooler or tinker with, as...

lazygun wrote:...but has anyone found out how you can measure the temps of the VRM's?

Latest version of GPU-Z lists VReg temperature.

This is supposed to hit german e-tailers shortly after easter, according to a post by caseking.de on another forum.
For those who didn't know, Alpenföhn has up to now primarily been selling re-branded Deepcool products, and the Peter certainly looks to fit right in their design scheme.

Of all the people that suggested using the original plate for VRMs, etc., does anyone have any before/after temps? Or even reference cooling temps? It'll depend alot on fan settings of course, but as comparison my card peaks at ~105°C for the VRMs and 65°C for core when running Furmark, with more...

As previously mentioned, keeping the stock red plate on takes care of any VRM temp issues. I really didn't like the sound of the Musashi stock fans though, so replaced them with two 92mm Gentle Typhoon. Took a bit of fiddling with fish line to get the fans snug and some trial-and-error to get two te...

If the idle power of the card is a concern (and it should be) there are at least two fairly convenient ways of underclocking it. Either by using a pre-modded BIOS (or modding your own) or by using ATI Tray Tools. I'm using the latter, with an overclocked (815/1000) profile for 3D usage and an underc...

I would recommend sticking with the stock red cooling plate to keep the VRM circuitry sufficiently chilled, you might want to replace the tim strips though. AFAIK, the only coolers that allow you to do this (without too much modding) is the aforementioned S1 and Scythe Musashi whereof I'm using the ...

Questions are: What aftermarket coolers would fit, and Can passive coolers adequately cool at load? Considering the layout is very similar to HD4870, I'd say any 4870 compatible cooler would fit 4890 just fine. With the redesigned and improved VRM circuitry that section of the card should no longer...

This article, just like the HD4870 Matrix one contains factual errors regarding Radeon BIOS Editor. Each powerplay state (power saving, UVD, 3D, throttling) has three separate clock modes (low, medium, high) and it is the latter that are shown in green, yellow and red, not the different powerplay st...