What temps should concern me?

rinaldo00

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I know I worry, a lot. I have two Galaxy 680s in SLI and before today I never saw temps above 65C. Today I played Far Cry 3 for the first time and temps actually hit 80C, even saw an 89C briefly. The strange thing is the fans never went above 42% This was with the fan in AUTO mode.

I switched to manual mode and set the fan to 60% but temps still stayed hot. Strangely the boost clock never throttled down, the boost clock stayed at 1188MHz (I don't overclock, but the card came with a boost clock of 1176MHz)

I run my cards with sync on and the other card stayed in the 60Cs, would that keep both cards from throttling back?


Here is my part of my GPU-Z log

GPU Core Clock [MHz] , GPU Memory Clock [MHz] , GPU Temp [°C] , Fan Speed (%)
1188.9 , 1502.3 , 81.0 , 61 ,

So I panicked a little and set fan speed manually to 95% The scary part is one card stayed between 70-71C while the other card was in the 60s. On my motherboard, a MSI P67A-GD65, the cards sit right next to each other. My CPU, i5-2500K even got up to 73C. I started to smell an electronic smell, not burning, but a noticable smell.

My brother was over and he said 'the max temp for your GPU is 98C, stop worrying' and we played like that for 3 hours.

Is this ok?
 
Is it okay for GPUs to run at 80 degrees? Yes.

That said, I would be concerned as to why they run that high, and investigate. Kepler cards do nothing on their own to reach those temperatures.

There's a billion things to try or look at, but fatigue is impairing my judgment. Only thing that comes to mind at the moment is switch the cards and see if anything's different.

EDIT: Oh, and I think synchronize clocks f's things up with Kepler because of the differing dynamic boosts. I turned mine off.
 
just how SLI is, if you could make your bottom card your primary you might be able to loose some heat as the 1st card will always take most of the load in anything first, even if the program your running does not take advantage of SLI the 1st card is still going to be taking on way more heat than it should.

I wonder if there is a way to do that, make the 2nd card your primary

edit : MSI afterburner lets you select a primary GPU
 
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Download MSI Afterburner , setup a fan profile so that it won't jump to such a high temp and it will instead gradually raise the fan speed 10 percent per 9C. That should keep it from hitting 80C or worst case 89C. You never .. EVER wanna run those GPU's at 90C+ , that's just asking for trouble.

The GTX 680's shouldn't really be running at such a high temp even in a SLI config. Personally I don't like anything above 60-65C in my 670 SLI config.

Also do you have good case ventilation? You aren't running your PC with the side panel off or something like that are you?
 
Here is a follow up.

First, I did a lot of searching on google about GTX 680 temps and a lot of people say they get temps of 75-80C when the card is under full load.

I am playing Far Cry maxed out, 2560x1600 4xMSAA, HDAO, and everything on Ultra. Both cards get to 98% load. I turned sync off and setup a fan curve. During the game both fans went to 95%. One card stayed at 60-61C, but the other card stayed at 70-73C. That is as cool as I can get them. Boost clock on both cards stayed at 1188.9 MHz and frame rates stayed in the mid 40s.
 
Is it okay for GPUs to run at 80 degrees? Yes.

That said, I would be concerned as to why they run that high, and investigate. Kepler cards do nothing on their own to reach those temperatures.

There's a billion things to try or look at, but fatigue is impairing my judgment. Only thing that comes to mind at the moment is switch the cards and see if anything's different.

EDIT: Oh, and I think synchronize clocks f's things up with Kepler because of the differing dynamic boosts. I turned mine off.

I turned sync off. If I get the energy I will try switching cards :)
 
just how SLI is, if you could make your bottom card your primary you might be able to loose some heat as the 1st card will always take most of the load in anything first, even if the program your running does not take advantage of SLI the 1st card is still going to be taking on way more heat than it should.

I wonder if there is a way to do that, make the 2nd card your primary

edit : MSI afterburner lets you select a primary GPU

That is a great idea but I read that makes no difference on GPU load.

The "master graphics processor selection" option in MSI Afterburner has no effect on SLI rendering. All this setting does is swap the GPU's in the Afterburner utility itself. By toggling this setting, you can apply unique fan and clock speed settings to any of your GPU's independently. You must have some sort of "placebo effect" going on, because simply swapping GPU's in Afterburner does not actually change the primary GPU in an SLI configuration.


Thread is here:

https://forums./default/topic/506632/sli/change-primary-sli-card/1
 
Download MSI Afterburner , setup a fan profile so that it won't jump to such a high temp and it will instead gradually raise the fan speed 10 percent per 9C. That should keep it from hitting 80C or worst case 89C. You never .. EVER wanna run those GPU's at 90C+ , that's just asking for trouble.

The GTX 680's shouldn't really be running at such a high temp even in a SLI config. Personally I don't like anything above 60-65C in my 670 SLI config.

Also do you have good case ventilation? You aren't running your PC with the side panel off or something like that are you?

I believe I have good case ventilation, I'll check it again. No, my side panel is not off. You really can keep your cards that cool even in SLI on full load? What cards do you own?
I read a lot of people say they get temps of 75-80C when the card is under full load.
 
Personally anything about 70C makes me uncomfortable but it shouldn't damage the card if you not at 70C+ 24/7. I cool mine with an H60 50 bucks can cool your card quite well if you fear too high temps.
 
Personally anything about 70C makes me uncomfortable but it shouldn't damage the card if you not at 70C+ 24/7. I cool mine with an H60 50 bucks can cool your card quite well if you fear too high temps.

So far it only gets that hot for the few hours I play Far Cry 3 ;) They are both idling at 30c now and the other games I play, like Company of Heroes hits 55-60C
 
The strange thing is the fans never went above 42% This was with the fan in AUTO mode.

I switched to manual mode and set the fan to 60% but temps still stayed hot.

thats your problem right there. 80C isn't bad for sli, but i would be worried about 89C.

before i added my third 680, my top card never went higher than 70C.
use percision x or msi afterburner to set up a custom fan profile, i just set my fan speed to go to 85% when temps hit 70C.
 
thats your problem right there. 80C isn't bad for sli, but i would be worried about 89C.

before i added my third 680, my top card never went higher than 70C.
use percision x or msi afterburner to set up a custom fan profile, i just set my fan speed to go to 85% when temps hit 70C.

Luckily that 89C was a one time spike, before I set up a fan curve. I thought leaving the cards in AUTO was the best, I know now it is not. Now my temps never go above 73C on the top card, 61C on the bottom. I wish I could get them both under 70C, I'll keep trying.
 
I noticed several times the "Auto" fan mode on GTX 670, 680 and especially the 690 are not aggressive enough especially when using SLI/Surround setup's, the biggest difference comes when you setup fan profiles on the cards! I had a significant drop in all three temps when setting up fan profiles for each. :)

Next thing you could do, if you have the room in your case is add a few extra fans for better cooling.
 
That is a great idea but I read that makes no difference on GPU load.

The "master graphics processor selection" option in MSI Afterburner has no effect on SLI rendering. All this setting does is swap the GPU's in the Afterburner utility itself. By toggling this setting, you can apply unique fan and clock speed settings to any of your GPU's independently. You must have some sort of "placebo effect" going on, because simply swapping GPU's in Afterburner does not actually change the primary GPU in an SLI configuration.


damn shame i know that now, come on Nvidia please let us select our primary card I think that would solve a ton of heat issues not so much in SLI but very much so when an application is only using one card.
 
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