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AMD's Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards are impressive on most fronts, but, they're a touch hotter than most users would like - particularly the single-slot Radeon HD 4850.

The heat-factor isn't helped by AMD's lacklustre automatic fan control. Up until now, users have been unable to manually control the speed of their fans.

That, however, is no longer the case as a forum user going by the name of bretware over at Guru3D has provided a useful workaround that'll let users manually control their card's fan speed, and consequently lower temperatures.

According to bretware, a user needs to follow these simple steps:

1. In Catalyst Control Centre, make sure clock and memory settings are correct and turn on Overdrive
2. Create a Catalyst Control Centre profile called "fanspeed"
3. Navigate to C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\ and you'll find an XML file titled "fanspeed", open the file in Notepad or your preferred editor. The file should resemble the following:
   
   <Feature name="FanSpeedAlgorithm_0">
   <Property name="FanSpeedAlgorithm" value="Manual" />
   </Feature>
   <Feature name="FanSpeedRPMTarget_0">
   <Property name="Want" value="0" />
   </Feature>
   <Feature name="FanSpeedPercentTarget_0">
   <Property name="Want" value="65" />
   
   
4. As shown above, change the "FanSpeedAlgorithm" value to Manual and the "FanSpeedPercentTarget" value to 65 (or your preferred fan speed in percentage)
   
5. Save the file and reload the "fanspeed" profile in Catalyst Control Centre.

If you're unable to locate the XML file, you may be required to set your operating system to show hidden/system files.

Bretware adds that "you may have to select the profile everytime you start the computer, but it will work until there is a fix or better info so i can figure how to change the auto target temp".

Eager adopters of bretware's fix have already reported drops in temperature of up to 30°C when running their fans at 65 - 70 per cent. We haven't yet had the opportunity to put the workaround to the test, but if you happen to be running one of AMD's latest-greatest and plan on manually configuring your fan speed, let us know how you get on in our forums.

Source: forums.guru3d.com

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