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6870 CF Cooling Solution

L

lsweet

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Joined
Apr 21, 2009
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I'm presently running two Sapphire 6870's in crossfire on an Asus Sabertooth X58 motherboard. The dual x16 slots, if you're not already aware, are very close together, limiting the airflow into the top card.

In my Lian Li PC-A70F case, idle temps are high, 37/56c idle temps (GPU1/2 respectively) and ramp up from there in any game being played, peaking at just under 80 degrees for the hottest gpu. The fan noise is quite loud as it ramps up.

It seems my choices are to either move one card down to the PCIe slot running at x4 speed to allow for better air flow but slowing everything down (I've read the Toms Hardware article, I know it's not a huge margin) or find an alternative cooling solution.

Any after market vga cooler I have come across seems like it would be too thick and wouldn't fit, even the thinnest cooler I've come across seems like it would only really correct the noise issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could go about cooling this setup? I'm almost starting to consider a water cooled loop just for the video cards...
 
It's funny you bring this up. I ran into the exact same problem. I have 2 XFX 6870's running in CF and they are extremely close together. The top card was hitting in excess of 90 C in Furmark. For reference I have a P8P67 Pro in a Lian Li PC-9F. I was not really sure what to do.

I installed 2 aftermarket coolers (A Twin Turbo on the top card and a Setsugen 2 on the bottom). I was able to drop my temps to about the same as yours, 36 bottom, 56 top idle and around 70 bottom, 80 top on load. I even moved all my HD's to a 5 1/4 bay so my two intake fans were completely unobstructed. I considered replacing my Noctuas with something that had a bit more kick, but I knew the noise would bother me.

In short, you are most likely out of luck. I've tried almost every solution I can think of at this point and short of going water cooling or moving to a single GPU, it's the price you will have to pay. And ultimately 80'ish C is really not that bad and I would honestly not worry about it that much.
 
Crossfire on X58 means heat and noise unfortunately - unless you get a high end board with many slots that can space the cards better, you're stuck with it.
 
You can probably get the cooler using MSI Afterburner to control the fan curves but this won't help the noise of course. Do you have a side panel fan blowing cool air onto the cards? I assume all your cables are ran cleanly and are out of the way of the fans and not blocking any airflow?
 
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