Originally Posted by Petrah
Saphire made mine (Saphire Radeon 1GB GDDR5 4870.. I did a lot of research before buying from this company to ensure they put out quality cooling along with a good warranty). It just has the ATI chip. My card gets no where near that temp on the CPU in a 25 man raid. Not all companies that make video cards put the same cooling on them. There are actually three different things on this particular card to watch the temps on, but the main temp that shows up on most guages is the one for the CPU on the card. The one you have to watch for is the temp on the cards memory, which will always run hotter. The memory is normally the first thing that causes a video card to go belly up due to overheating issues. 
I choose to keep my temps at their lowest so that I can obtain the best possible performance and help my hardware last longer.  |
Funny enough, so is mine (And the soon to arrive 5870 :-p).
I'll admit that core temps did drop tho after the bios update (a non sapphire IIRC) and well, I never said I got these temps with WoW :-p
WoW doesn't seem to use the card to it's fullest apparently either. Sure enough the monitors may show it's running at 750mhz but according to some it only uses 50% of the shaders available. (Tried overclocking it to the max that ATI Overdrive allows (850mhz) and hardly got 2 fps more) or, since WoW is an DX9 (and think it started development when dx8 was mainstream) and CPU depended (and not that optimised when using more then 1 core either) game.
Regarding mem overheating, the stock cooler is sometimes way better then replacement coolers that seem to focus on cooling the GPU, and people tend not to look at that when they decide to replace the cooler.