A developer reported that voltage regulation module (VRM) of the Radeon HD 4870 and 4890 might have a short lifetime. This would be linked to their tendency to overheat when the card is fully loaded, especially when running benchmark tests. The quality of those components might not be good enough to last on thelong term.
This is not really new, as we already mentioned it in our recent article dedicated to the procedure to improve cooling system of the Radeon HD 48x0.
Despite this report, our test with the HD 4890 overclocked at 1 GHz by increasing the GPU voltage did not lead to any problem, while it submitted heavy load on the VRM. We will analyze this report carefully in our future tests. One should mention that benchmark test usually bypass the protection designed by AMD to get the most out of the card. This would explain why some testers have been reporting temperature reaching or going over 100°C during test, while such temperature were never achieved when playing games with the card.
Some graphic card manufacturers have decided to install VRM of higher quality on their overclocked HD 4870 and 4890. But this has a cost of course.
