Cooling Down My Thermonuclear GTX280

[NoxTek]

So I discovered recently that my launch day EVGA Nvidia Geforce GTX 280 was suffering from the overheating problem that plagued so many of the first revision cards. Symptoms were that within a few minutes of stress testing the core temperatures would shoot past 100 degrees Celsius and the card would begin to either throttle or artifact. Why now, you ask? Well after I got the GTX280 I barely had time to play anything due to a slew of health problems. It's been two years and only now have I felt comfortable enough to get into some heavy gaming again.

Unfortunately my card isn't covered by the "lifetime" warranty EVGA so proudly and prominently advertises. Why? Because I didn't register my newly purchased card within the 30 day deadline (it was more like 60 days) and so I got a 1 year warranty. MAKE SURE TO REGISTER YOUR CARDS AS SOON AS YOU PURCHASE THEM, FOLKS!

So left without any solutions nor any help from EVGA I decided to take matters into my own hands. I absolutely cannot afford to replace this card right now. A solution had to be found. Surely a redneck geek like me armed with tons of different fans and a fistfull of zip ties could come up with a way to cool this bad boy down!

I present to you my horribly redneck Geforce GTX 280 cooler!

-- Removing the original cooler and cleaning the GPU --

-- The world's first GTX280 hovercraft! --

Videos:

YouTube- TheGeekRedneck - 7-21-2010 - Overheating EVGA GTX 280

YouTube- TheGeekRedneck - Thermonuclear GTX 280 Cooling
​

Yup, it's ugly. Yup, it takes up three slots. I honestly didn't even expect it to work thinking that the card was faulty or in the process of dying. Much to my surprise it actually made quite the difference!

Stock cooling: 58C idle, 110+C load after 10 minutes of Furmark 'Extreme Burning Mode' w/ PP & Displacement mapping
Redneck cooling: 43C idle, 79C load after 30 minutes of Furmark 'Extreme Burning Mode' w/ PP & Displacement mapping

 

[defaultluser]

Dude, not bad!

But a tip: if you're going to take such terrible pictures, the least you could do is resize them to 1024x768. Give them a pass with the sharpener while you're at it. I hate to waste 3MB bandwidth on something that looks like it was taken by a cellphone.

 

[NoxTek]

Dude, not bad!

But a tip: if you're going to take such terrible pictures, the least you could do is resize them to 1024x768. Give them a pass with the sharpener while you're at it. I hate to waste 3MB bandwidth on something that looks like it was taken by a cellphone.

Better?



BTW, just played 45 minutes worth of Crysis at high settings and 2XAA and the temperature never went past 70C... w00t!

 

[defaultluser]

Better?



BTW, just played 45 minutes worth of Crysis at high settings and 2XAA and the temperature never went past 70C... w00t!

Yes, much better

That's quite an accomplishment! The stock fan was doing around 80-90C at load, from the reviews I remember.

 

[kuyaglen]

A Delta coupled with a Yate Loon...almost makes too much sense.