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How to control the fan speed of your Radeon HD 4850/4870

by Parm Mann on 30 June 2008, 18:01

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qany7

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AMD's Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards are impressive on most fronts, but, they're a touch hotter than most users would like - particularly the single-slot Radeon HD 4850.

The heat-factor isn't helped by AMD's lacklustre automatic fan control. Up until now, users have been unable to manually control the speed of their fans.

That, however, is no longer the case as a forum user going by the name of bretware over at Guru3D has provided a useful workaround that'll let users manually control their card's fan speed, and consequently lower temperatures.

According to bretware, a user needs to follow these simple steps:

  1. In Catalyst Control Centre, make sure clock and memory settings are correct and turn on Overdrive
  2. Create a Catalyst Control Centre profile called "fanspeed"
  3. Navigate to C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\ and you'll find an XML file titled "fanspeed", open the file in Notepad or your preferred editor. The file should resemble the following:

    <Feature name="FanSpeedAlgorithm_0">
    <Property name="FanSpeedAlgorithm" value="Manual" />
    </Feature>
    <Feature name="FanSpeedRPMTarget_0">
    <Property name="Want" value="0" />
    </Feature>
    <Feature name="FanSpeedPercentTarget_0">
    <Property name="Want" value="65" />

  4. As shown above, change the "FanSpeedAlgorithm" value to Manual and the "FanSpeedPercentTarget" value to 65 (or your preferred fan speed in percentage)
  5. Save the file and reload the "fanspeed" profile in Catalyst Control Centre.

If you're unable to locate the XML file, you may be required to set your operating system to show hidden/system files.

Bretware adds that "you may have to select the profile everytime you start the computer, but it will work until there is a fix or better info so i can figure how to change the auto target temp".

Eager adopters of bretware's fix have already reported drops in temperature of up to 30°C when running their fans at 65 - 70 per cent. We haven't yet had the opportunity to put the workaround to the test, but if you happen to be running one of AMD's latest-greatest and plan on manually configuring your fan speed, let us know how you get on in our forums.

Source: forums.guru3d.com



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Clever but it does show a vulnerability, in theory some joker can switch off your fan with a simple xml and make you fry your card it seems, unless it has an automatic GPU shutdown as CPU's took such a long time to acquire but now all have.
Yep it works, but it now sounds like a hurricane. :confused:

I think I am gona turn it back to automatic, much quieter and tbh the temps weren't really bothering me anyway.
Wshlist
Clever but it does show a vulnerability, in theory some joker can switch off your fan with a simple xml and make you fry your card it seems, unless it has an automatic GPU shutdown as CPU's took such a long time to acquire but now all have.

Only if you manually load the hacked XML file which someone just happened to be able to place on your computer in exactly the right place.. all just to have the card throttle itself to stop getting too hot.. no, not what hackers are really going to be interested in if they managed to get that much control over your computer..

You don't have to set it to manual either, you can keep it automatic to maintain some level of ramp up I think.
will it work for a 3870 too?
I just did this on my card, I was running pretty hot at around 63 degrees, I followed the steps and set my value to 60&#37; and my temp dropped to 47 degrees almost 20 degree difference yes the fan is a bit loud but nothing that annoys me, I will probably turn it up to 65% and try to get it a bit lower so I have a bit of room when I play games..

So yes this post is a great post for those of you who didnt want to “test” it out..

Also the way to do this for XP (which is the operating system I am using is a bit different then described here. for that watch this video

youtube.com/watch?v=Xmyp_UqQnQM

sorry I dont have 5 posts to post URL's yet