Advice needed - trifire 6970s way too hot

wuLFe

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Hey folks

Was hoping to get some advice from everybody regarding a problem I'm having with excessive heat:

I recently bought a 6970 to add to my two unlocked 6950s to be able to drive my Eyefinity resolutions - however, I am running these with a Maximus Extreme motherboard (2600K CPU), and the temps I'm getting on these cards are scary to say the least.

Running at 80%+ fan speed (and clocked to 1100 volts, 800MHz, 1250 MHz), the bottom card is hitting 90C, the middle maxing at around 93C and the top getting to the low 80s (load temps, obviously :))

Now, I believe one of the big problems is with the Maximus MB not allowing for any breathing room between the three cards - as far as I see it, I have three options, and I wanted to get opinions on which would be the best:

a) Today I ordered a P67 WS Revolution board from Newegg, for the sole reason that it has 4 PCI-E slots, which will allow me to space out the cards better, and improve airflow - this one could end up saving me money, since I will probably sell the Maximus for more than I paid for the WS - however, I'm not convinced that spacing out the cards better will make a huge difference.

b) Sell the two unlocked 6950s, and buy one 6990 (will likely have to pay in about $200 for the honor). If I do this combined with (a) above, the entire "upgrade" will end up only costing me about $100 though

c) Water cooling - been meaning to do this for a while, but it seems like it will be super expensive cooling 3 GPUs, let alone adding a CPU into the loop. I have absolutely no equipment for the loop, so I estimate it will set me back about $500, which is pretty scary.

So - I guess the question is which of those three scenarios would work best - do you folks think that just switching to the WS revolution might bring my temps down to tolerable levels - I'm worried that it will be a downgrade, although honestly, I don't really utilize all the bells and whistles of the Maximus board anyhow.

Any advice, ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated.
 
Difficult choice; a) will still leave you with two cards butted together, so I guess this won't help too much. With b) you are paying $200 for a bit more quiet, 10oC lower temps and slightly lower performance. I dont know masses about water cooling but c) will be really expensive and quite an undertaking, but if you were definitely gonna do it anyway I suppose you might as well plough on. Personally I'd do d), leave it as is, since those temps aren't outrageous, but I suppose if that were viable you wouldn't be posting here, if that is that 80% fan speed on the stock cooler, then that is LOUD.
 
Those temps are actually normal. You can wedge something between the cards though to stop them from flopping against each other.

Mine hit up to 100c sometimes.
 
I think a) will make a difference, what case do you have? What fans are you running? What are the temps like for your other components?
 
Obviously, if money were no object, water cooling would be far and away the best bet. But since it seems like buying 3x$100 blocks, pump, fittings, cpu block, rad, etc...it can get out of hand fast. Watercooling is actually a pretty good investment for the CPU side of things, GPUs on the other hand you basically take a bath every time you buy a GPU block.

Spacing them out will help, but not that much. I'm guessing the ambient air in your case is going to be scorching no matter what you do with fans. A 6990 would be a sideways "up"grade and I'm not even sure at that. Go for A) and hope for the best, or start pinching pennies and get a WC loop setup.
 
just throwing this out there you will have a extremely hard time getting away with only 500 for liquid cooling to do it right your looking at prolly $1000 or so maybe 300 for just gpu blocks 40 or 50 for a cpu block 80 for a pump prolly 200 in rads still need tubing (Which is cheap) but compression fittings or barbs so it could be done for maybe 750 but even then im not sure...
 
Yup - I have to say that I think water cooling is too rich for my blood right now - especially, as was stated above, that GPU blocks are not transferrable - I'm thinking of rebuilding the system with the WS Revolution, and seeing how it goes - if it's not better, I'll try and sell of the 2 6950s and get a 6990 to replace it, so I'm only dealing with two cards in crossfire - right now, it's just a little too loud to be a long-term solution, so although those temps are still within tolerable limits, I think that going to the revolution board might help at least a little.
 
You could get universal GPU blocks. They don't cover the RAM etc, so you'd need to get RAM sinks and put a fan to blow across them, but then you'd have all the equipment with only minimal stuff needing to be purchased for future builds.
 
What resolution are you running? six monitors? I run three 1680x1050 monitors for 5840x1050 and have almost no issues with a single unlocked 6950. Do you really NEED that third 6950/70? Source games run the best because it's old tech.... Only in Metro 2033 did I need to run one monitor...
 
This is [H], we aren't about needs here. e-peen and gratuitous amounts of processing power just for the sake of it is our MO. Don't sully that. =p
 
What resolution are you running? six monitors? I run three 1680x1050 monitors for 5840x1050 and have almost no issues with a single unlocked 6950. Do you really NEED that third 6950/70? Source games run the best because it's old tech.... Only in Metro 2033 did I need to run one monitor...

I'm running 3600x1920 at the moment (3x1920x1200 monitors in portrait mode) - many games work just fine, but not all - for example, Portal 2 was perfectly fine with crossfire, but games like "The Witcher 2", "Metro 2033" and "Crysis" even struggle with the 3 cards - i definitely can't enable "Ubersampling" in the witcher at that res - it drops to single digits and is unplayable. So it's not entirely e-peen related - most of the games I'm excited about I'm expecting to have pretty harsh GPU requirements (Skyrim, Rage) and clearly for full detail, 2 cards doesn't cut it anymore.
 
I'm running 3600x1920 at the moment (3x1920x1200 monitors in portrait mode) - many games work just fine, but not all - for example, Portal 2 was perfectly fine with crossfire, but games like "The Witcher 2", "Metro 2033" and "Crysis" even struggle with the 3 cards - i definitely can't enable "Ubersampling" in the witcher at that res - it drops to single digits and is unplayable. So it's not entirely e-peen related - most of the games I'm excited about I'm expecting to have pretty harsh GPU requirements (Skyrim, Rage) and clearly for full detail, 2 cards doesn't cut it anymore.

Those 3 games you mention are all pigs when it comes to graphics power. I don't have the Witcher 2 yet but the other two I can't come close to maxing out /w 2x6950 and I'm lower res than you are.

Regarding your temps, I've got 2x reference 6950's right next to each other and my cards don't break 75c/50% fan even when ambient temp is ~85f. I assume you've got reference style cards so this is all based on that assumption. When first got my crossfire setup, I found that getting air pushed at the blower intakes is critical for keeping the AMD cards cool. I don't know what case you've got but you need to get cool air to the blowers somehow. (In my case the FT02 has a 180mm intake fan about 1" away from the edge of the cards.) I've also found that wedging the cards apart a bit makes a huge temp difference for the inside card as it lets some air get between the cards. Many people use a twist tie; I used a bit of a silicone pad (~$5 @Target). But something to space the cards out a few mm will drop your temps a ton if you have air blowing at the cards. (The new mobo will solve this problem for one of the cards but you can use the spacing trick for the other two.)

A 6990 will put a lot of hot air back into your case as it exhausts at both ends; depending on your case this might not help at all or it could even make things worse by raising your internal case temp.
 
I think a) will make a difference, what case do you have? What fans are you running?

This is what I'm wondering as well. How is the overall airflow for your case? If anything perhaps upgrading to a case with better airflow could make a difference. Although really running 3 overclocked cards those temps are right where they should be on average.
 
This is what I'm wondering as well. How is the overall airflow for your case? If anything perhaps upgrading to a case with better airflow could make a difference. Although really running 3 overclocked cards those temps are right where they should be on average.

I am running the NZXT Phantom case - one of the more "reasonably priced" full tower cases - there are quite a few fans running in there, but nothing near the video cards - however, there is a place to mount a 120mm right over the video cards location, so maybe that would be a good thing to try.

I have put spacers between the cards (I bought some small cork spaces from a hardware store for this purpose), but the difference it made was only marginal. Maybe I should try switching motherboards and installing a high-end high power fan there - any suggestions on that end - I've heard good things about the Scythe fans...

So - I guess in essence, the next step is to replace the Maximus with the WS Revolution, install the cards in slots 1, 2, 4 of the WS, and then install the 120mm fan and see what happens.

All the advice is much appreciated - thanks again, folks!
 
I think you'll see another marginal improvement with your plan, but again those temps are what are to be expected, so unless you want to do something hardcore along the lines of watercooling, it'll be something you'll either have to live with or put the cards back to stock. TBH I'm not sure if GPU overclocking in most cases, especially when you have 3 cards, is worth the extra power draw and heat compared to the small performance gains you get.
 
Try setting up a fan or two to blow air onto the cards, so that the air is blowing into the gaps. Might be worth checking out before you spend big money.
 
I think a) will make a difference, what case do you have? What fans are you running? What are the temps like for your other components?

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Zip tie heads wedged between cards to keep them spaced apart.
 
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