HD 4850 Previews

[Eastcoasthandle]

I recently picked two (Visiontek) of these up for some crossfire goodness. You can see my system specs below. I'm not a fan boy and both Nvidia and Ati can kiss my arse. I'll share a few observations. These cards run hot as hell. You will burn your fingers trying to touch these after running for a few minutes. Idles around 78* and loads well over 90*. I have 4 120MM fans blowing on the case side and I encountered numerous lockups at stock speeds. Default fan speeds suck and hopefully rivatuner will allow for adjustments. Crossfire doesn't scale all that well on my current motherboard. I had various lockups and performance wasn't that impressive. Other reviews seemed much better. I loaded updated 8.6 drivers and the Vista X64 hotfix, but nothing really mattered. Ati should drop the price on this thing closer to $130 for this to be a decent deal and use a better cooler. I'm sure others might have better luck with a dual x16 Pci Express board, but I still expected more out of this with my P35 chipset. I think I'm going to stepup to a GTX 260 and trade-in my G92 GTS. However, I would definitely recommend the G92 GTS over the Ati 4850 at current price levels and I would be cautious with crossfire on certain mainboards because YMMV.

Final conclusions: (1) seems slower than a G92 GTS for around the same price and (2) G92 GTS runs cooler and overclocks like a champ

I just read your post and I believe part of your problem is that your motherboard (P5K DLX) is a P35 chipset which uses a PCI Express x16 + PCI Express x4 when CF is used. It's better to get a x38 chipset board or other motherboard that supports full x16/x16 PCIe if you want to do CF. Having a x16/x4 PCIe setup can hinder performance and in some cases make things worse performance wise. As far as the heat goes the thermal compound needs to be replaced using either AS5 ceramic or MX5 (or something better then the OEM thermal compound). Hopefully, this will reduce your temps. Personally, I've always lapped the heatsink as I've always found milling grooves in the past (not sure about this one you will have to check yourself).