Quote Originally Posted by LordEC911 View Post
Nothing to do with the bios, they had to fix the memory controllers and possibly have something change on the GDDR5.

There was a flickering when the memory clocks changed, which is why they didn't implement the lower memory clocks w/ powerplay.
They had to mod the BIOS so it boots with lower clocks so YES it had something to do with the BIOS. There might have been stability issues but it was the memory being too high that caused the overheating on these, just by downclocking the ram it was able to cool down itself with the stock cooler, below 50c. No flickering/crashes/bugs ever running 6 months, ofc not all cards the same. Notice the difference since the 4870 http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews....842&pageid=20#

What ATI talked about stability loss is when they lowered the CORE clock, not the ram, hell i even ran it at 100mhz no problem.

Quote Originally Posted by Chickenfeed View Post
I just wish Artic Cooling (or someone) would make some new heatsinks that use a full shroud and exhaust but still outperform the reference ones. My biggest issue with aftermarket is everything but water bleeds all the heat into the case. This is why I never ordered a 4870x2 Accellero ( that and it took 10 years to release ) I couldn't imagine the heat from 2 (up to 600watts of heat...) of those being bled into a case... Any reduction in noise levels would be lost as you'd need to have some serious high rpm exhaust to combat the ambient case heat XD
My experience so far with the Accelero is that since it's able to cool (efficient) it's not really pushing lot of hot air into the case. Say you do a cold boot @ room temp 20c, once booted my card stays @37celcius idle, loading a crysis for 1hour the card is running at 55 maximum and CPU temps are similar to when i had stock cooler. I know, different story with 2 of them, but a good vented case with 24cm fans should be okay, mine is a HAF932.