I've had a 4870 about two weeks now - the xpertvision/palit dual model - fitted quite tightly into my XQPack2. the card is fine and I got it at an excellent price, but one thing various comments and articles mentioned about it was that it doesn't vent air out the back of the case, in part because it doesn't have a plastic shroud like the standard 4870. The two fans do a fine job of keeping it cool (albeit noisy and I'm thinking about replacing them at some point), but the hot air vents into the side of the case, and there's very little clearance to the PSU above. The PSU is a Corsair VX450w. I know that it is recommend to use a 500w PSU, but I figured the corsair would cope fine because it is meant to very efficient and I've not seen any reviews of system configurations with a 4870 in it where the power consumption goes over 370w .
This evening I started to notice a smell like burning whilst I was gaming (nothing too demanding - just Rome Total War), so shut down the pc quickly, popped the case and too a look. the heatsink on the card was very hot, and I wondered whether the problem might have been the PSU fan taking in hot air from the card below and causing problems? I wondered turning the PSU upside down and drilling some holes in the top of the case made sense - pulling in cooler air from outside. Any other ideas what it might be?
The rest of the system is as follows:
Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H mobo
4 gig ddr2 corsair ram
Athlon 5000 Black EDition CPU.
Samsung 250gb Spinpoint F1
Samusng DVD Drive
Silverstone SST-MFP51B remote control/LCD display.
This evening I started to notice a smell like burning whilst I was gaming (nothing too demanding - just Rome Total War), so shut down the pc quickly, popped the case and too a look. the heatsink on the card was very hot, and I wondered whether the problem might have been the PSU fan taking in hot air from the card below and causing problems? I wondered turning the PSU upside down and drilling some holes in the top of the case made sense - pulling in cooler air from outside. Any other ideas what it might be?
The rest of the system is as follows:
Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H mobo
4 gig ddr2 corsair ram
Athlon 5000 Black EDition CPU.
Samsung 250gb Spinpoint F1
Samusng DVD Drive
Silverstone SST-MFP51B remote control/LCD display.