HD 5850 With NF-M2PV motherboard - 26th March

It's been a while since I last posted on this blog and so, I've decided today to make a couple of postings to continue the life of this blog (although I doubt that many people actually read it) but anyways, changing to a HD 5850 is relatively easy but in a mother board like NF-M2PV, there maybe problems arising.

The Sapphire HD 5850 looks like the image below:-

It is a great card actually, running at approximately 50C when idle and 60+C when on load. BFBC2 is nor playable with High settings without a lot of lags. The thing is that, the installation process was not smooth at first considering that the motherboard is a Abit NF-M2PV where the PCI-e slot is being blocked by the chipset cooler at the rear of the card slot. The Abit NF-M2PV board looks like the image below:-

As you can see, the horizontal orange slot is the PCI-e slot, and in the right (black passive cooler) is for the chipset. The cooler was too high and was blocking the GPU's rear. The solution was indeed fairly simple, replacement of the cooler. Fortunately, all you need is to obtain another chipset cooler which was having a lower depth than the one shown, recommended is a Abit Fatal1ty board chipset cooler like the one shown in the image below which solves the problem:-



Having done so, the Power Supply Unit would then have to be replaced. The PSU that can be used is the Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus 650W. In contrary to what most reviews say, the Cooler Master PSU is quite a moderate unit and it is able to power a HD 5850 unlike what most people on the Net say. Although, I would complain on the low 120mm PSU fan speed which does not do much in transferring heat from the case to the external areas.