heatsink removal with HD4850

so, i have my tube of arctic silver 5 ready, but can't seem to remove the heat sink from my HD4850.

it has a number of standard size screws around the perimeter of the card, which i can remove, and four tiny screws on a square metal bracket beneath the board where the GPU is... and i can't unscrew those. they are screwed too tightly for my terrible precision screw drivers.

my question is, do i need to remove those 4 screws? if not, i tried to remove the heatsink without unscrewing them, and it won't come off. perhaps the thermal compound is gluing the heatsink down...

yes you need to remove then

btw i use this to lower the heat of my hd4850 : Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cooler

nutters. well, i guess i'll have to go with finding a way to make the fan spin faster. my earlier attempt almost stripped one of the screws, so i'm gonna wait until i can get better precision tools before trying again.

You can force your fan faster with Rivatuner and Atitool, altough I think this card isnt supported yet.
Remember, upto 90C is normal for a 4850.

Well, even if it is ''normal'' it isn't desirable because it is bad for Ambient Temps.

And of course, keeping your GPU cool is never a bad idea in the first place. I use Rivatuner and it works fine, I'm sure they'll release support for the new cards soon.

ambient temps are fine on mine. the case is very well ventilated.

anyways, apparently the fan idles at a measly 2%. once compatible rivatuner comes out (atitools doesn't work, because it's not "digitally signed" and won't run on vista 64bit), i'll crank up the fans and see what happens.

That's ati traytools you are talking about, there's also atitool.

You can setup fan speed profiles using Rivatuner. When I had fans on my video card, I set the fan to 60% default and 100% if >60C (load). When it went <60C, it'd go back to 60% fan speed.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=14111

Follow the link:

When I turn mine up to 60% it sounds like a wind tunnel. So i changed it back to auto. But to be honest the ambient temp inside my case have been exactly the same as before i put the 4850 in.

BTW My FPS is capped at 60. Is this normal?

Ahh, well when my 8800GTS over-heats the CPU gets hotter too, so maybe it's just me, but my case does have good ventilation anyway.

Infinite: Your FPS is capped at 60 because you probably have Vertical Sync on, and I don't recommend turning it off.. as you will get screen tearing.. blah blah.. no need for more than 60 FPS so leave it on.

yeah i know about that fix. i'm using it now, with fan set at 40%. 40% is mostly quiet.

moriz if you really want to get the fan of you can by using a precision screwdriver and holding the top of that screwdriver tight with a set of pliers (hope i say it right)

That way you can hold the precision screwdriver alot better and you're able to get those tiny screws loose as long as you're carefull while doing so

(i had to do it this way on the fansinks of my 7800gt's to clean the dust out of them)