Hello again,

I saw many gamers asking about the system requirements of a particular game or asking a very common question "Can my system run this game ?".

I thing I should share this with those who don't know about it, I use a website service from "System Requirements Lab" the web address is www.systemrequirementslab.com.

This website contains all the latest games you want to play on your rig including games like FarCry 2, Fallout 3 etc... You can select them from the drop down menu as shown in the image.

After selection the service will automatically test your system online that whether it can handle the selected game or not. The results are pretty accurate as well as detailed too. It also shows you the area in which you are behind the minimum requirement of the game.

After analysis it will provide you the links to update your drivers (if they are out dated ofcourse).

So if you want to quickly check your system that whether it can run a particular game or not, you can do so with the help of this great website, see it for yourself.

Enjoy folks !

Hello there guys,

This is my first blog on GS so I apologize in advance for any mistakes that I do, I am starting my blog with the most loveliest gift I got from my father in these holidays, as you can guess it is my new graphics card the mighty Radeon HD 4870 512 MB :D (from Sapphire). It is a very good card, runs all my games like a charm.

First of all I was surprised by its size and length, it does not look that big in pictures but in actual it is one giant of a card, the reason for my surprise is that I upgraded from XFX 8600 GT to this one, so as you can see its really a big jump and it really surprises me.

Here is the boxshot of Sapphire 4870 512 MB card

Okay now I get back to the main topic, when I got this card I was worried about the temperatures because ATI cards are famous for their relatively high temperatures.

To some extent my tension was right because when I removed my old card and attached this new one, the idle temperatures were around 66 to 68 deg centigrades (monitored using ATI's Overdrive), which is alarming because if it remains at these temps in idle mode than what will happen during load ? So I started googling around and find that there are some people replacing the stock cooler with some pretty fancy after market coolers which not only look good but also cool good but the problem is that these after market coolers are very expensive.

To be honest I am not interested in investing in an after market cooler right now so I googled more for other alternatives and I find some results with names like 4870 FanFix, when I watched these articles I was again surprised to find out how efficient these articles are to drop temperatures of your card.

for me ATI Overdrive is totally a new applications because previously I was a user of Nvidia cards, I must say that Overdrive is an impressive application because you get a higher degree of control over your graphic card settings.

Nvidia does not provide utilities like ATI's Overdrive (for Overclocking, Speed control, temp monitoring.... etc) it relies on third party utilities like RivaTuner. Nvidia also does not allow to manually control fan speeds which is annoying really.

Okay, when I tried out those articles about FanFix and increased the fan speed from a default of 22% (duty cycle) to 40% It made an impressive drop of 22C in temperature at idle and moved it from 68C to 46C (WOW!) and 40% duty cycle is not loud too. Now I tested my 4870 under load with the aid of games like Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Assassins Creed and of course Far Cry 2 and I am very happy to say that the results are very good. The graphic card didn't go past 64C to 65C in temp which is quiet safe for ATI cards. I also tested my card under load with ATI Tool and the result was same.

Here are the idle temps

Load temps are as follows

Increasing duty cycle past 40% drops temperature even further but also increases fan noise considerably, even an increase from 40% to 50% caused a significant change in noise level which you can easily note. Duty cycles past 80% are extremely fast as well as loud like a jet running inside your rig :lol: but we really don't need that kind of fan speed.

My card which is based on ATI's reference design manage to give such great cooling results, you can achieve even better results if you have Radeon 4870 based on Sapphire's own design for example the TOXIC version of card from Sapphire has a different fan and a better heat sink.

Here is the close up of reference fan

Now what I am thinking is that is it really necessary to purchase an expensive after market cooler for 4870 when the stock cooler is that much solid ? With a little modification to fan speed you can get pretty impressive cooling and the good thing is it is not that much loud either (at 40% duty cycle).

In the end I am leaving here a link of that article which I have used for modifying my 4870's fan speed, its a very good article read it if you like

http://nwgat.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/ati-radeon-hd-4870-4850-fanfix/

The article also applies on 4850.

You can also used RivaTuner to make different FAN profiles and trigger them on events such as core temp reaching a particular level, this makes your fan even more smarter for cooling and also gives you a way to customize speeds as you like for example if you want the fan to run at 80% when temps reach at 70C you can do so with RivaTuner. I will write a detailed how-to about that RivaTuner profiles once I see whether you guys like my this blog or not:)

Thanks for reading folks.