6850 Crossfire Cooling

[B_Naughty]

Hey folks.

I recently added a 2nd 6850 to my setup and am having some major heat issues. The top card is reaching 110+ degrees celsius under load. Just curious if anyone has any recommendations for a two slot aftermarket cooler that may help.

As you can see things are pretty tight:

 

[collegeboy69us]

Don't know what type of case you have, or if you are okay with running no side panel 24/7 but you need some side cooling badly.

Your cards don't exhaust their heat out the back panel so everything is getting trapped.

It's nice your cards have vented tops though whatever air you get blowing on it looks like it will get down quite good to the heatsink itself.

Depending on your case looks like some modding is in order If money is an issue the cheapest/easiest solution would be to go buy one of those 10 dollar 24" box fans from walmart and just set it pointing on the side of your case pretty close.

Another more compact solution would be to zip tie two high flow 80mm fans to the top slats of the card, that would get some really nice air movement going.

 

[tunatime]

easy fix duct tape a 120 mm fan or 2 to the side of the cards ( dotn put the tape on the pcb just tape the hell out of to the heat sinks ) or go get you some tie wraps and tiw warp it to the heat sink and if any of the fan goes past the cards just put some tape over that part of the fan so the air has to go though the cards

 

[B_Naughty]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions folks.

I'm running an unmodified Antec P180 case. I try to keep things quiet (yeah, I know, stupid move getting two video cards huh?), so I probably won't be modding the case or running without the side on.

I'm gonna try throwing a couple fans on the sides of the cards before I waste any money on an aftermarket GPU cooler that'll still probably not get enough air. I just found this nifty fan bracket that Zalman used to make:

http://www.zalman.com/eng/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=226

...looks like amazon still has a couple sellers for it. Might give that a try


edit: here's another option that looks a little more appealing to me:

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/1...-_Black_BT027.html?tl=g47c121s262&id=GtsV5Mx4

 

[Met-AL]

Wow, those are super close together.

I added a 120mm fan intake on the side of my case and it made a 10C difference on my 6850 c-fire

 

[B_Naughty]

Wow, those are super close together.

I added a 120mm fan intake on the side of my case and it made a 10C difference on my 6850 c-fire

Yeah, unfortunately due to the setup of my mobo I can't do 16x if I move one down (they'll drop to 4x).

 

[Met-AL]

Yeah, unfortunately due to the setup of my mobo I can't do 16x if I move one down (they'll drop to 4x).

You should try it and see if it makes a difference. 4x on PCI-e 2.0 is still pretty good bandwidth.

 

[stealthy123]

I recommend the macguyver method.

remove eraser from pencil, wedge in between cards, maybe even a two pencil eraser job,watch temps drop.

also, try one in 4x mode, sometimes it doesn't make much difference.

and from what I think I know about that case, isn't there a 120mm fan on the front directly blowing on the vidcards? I think it's part of a hard drive cage?

 

[Cerulean]

You want a couple of these: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m3XusgQ9No

 

[B_Naughty]

I recommend the macguyver method.

remove eraser from pencil, wedge in between cards, maybe even a two pencil eraser job,watch temps drop.

also, try one in 4x mode, sometimes it doesn't make much difference.

and from what I think I know about that case, isn't there a 120mm fan on the front directly blowing on the vidcards? I think it's part of a hard drive cage?

Looks like my 3rd pci express slot is too low, so that'll end up snuffing out the bottom card.

I went ahead and wedged a couple erasers between the cards. Then I slapped a spare 120mm fan on their sides. Now I'm sitting at about 85 degrees C under load with the case buttoned up!

I actually have the drive cage pulled out, because the closest mount for a fan by the cards is all the way in the front of the case...

 

[B_Naughty]

You want a couple of these: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m3XusgQ9No

I actually used to have one of those a long time ago! I got rid of it after a cut the very tip of my finger off with it

 

[Met-AL]

Have you tried to set up MSI Afterburner and use a custom fan profile?

Here is my fan profile:

Here was my temps under load with that profile while running BF3 before adding a 120mm fan to the side:

After the fan addition both cards are in the 60's.