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Crossfiring non-reference cards and temperatures

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picket23

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 3, 2013
Messages
153
So I am hoping to get some advice from those that have had a bit of experience with crossfire. I am likely going to crossfire two amd cards from their upcoming series and living in a hot climate would like some input on how different coolers have performed for you.

I would prefer not to go with reference designs, but is there a viable alternative for crossfire systems? If quality case fans are installed, will open air coolers perform well?

Or do any brands offer designs that exhaust hot air out of the case and perform better than reference temp/noise wise?
 
You really need fast side fans or to ghetto rig a fan right near the fans to force some air inbetween the cards with non-reference coolers. Yeah it can work but usually not as well as a blower style cooler.

You could try the His IceQ as long as you have three spaces between cards. Its a non-reference blower style. I've heard good things.
 
If you don't have any extra slots between PCI-E slots (other than the one slot occupied by the cooler) go for blower, if you have more, go for open air style. Simple as that. I tried sandwiching three 770s with open air (Windforce 4GBs) and running 3DMark they were at 100% fan (i.e. aircraft taking off sound level) and hit 99C and were still climbing fast when I shut down 3DMark, and rose another 5C (to 104) even after I shut it down, until they started cooling off. And this is with 72F ambient and great case air flow. And who knows where the temps would have topped out at. Could have been 130C before they stopped climbing for all I know, and they probably would have fried before they even reached that point.

I don't think two cards sandwiched with open air would really be any better than three. The top card in a tri sli sandwich isn't really any different than the top card in a two card set up, assuming you have decent case air flow.

Rigging some of those flexible lollipop fans would help, as would 1 or 2 fat 120mms in a side window blowing into the crevice between the cards, but I don't think it'd be enough based on my experience, especially not with high ambients. Even if it lowered temps by 30% it still wouldn't have been enough, and I'm not sure it'd come anywhere near lowering them by that much.

Running two open air cards with 2 slots between them (3 slots between PCBs), however, works fine. And I would guess 1 open slot (2 slots between PCBs) would be okay as well, but don't know for sure.
 
You can have great case ventilation, the problem is the bottom open air fan dumping hot air to the one above which is then sucked up since the cards are so close. So yeah one slot between them helps, or a seperate slot blower fan in-between them to get rid of that hot bottom card air. I also heard the IceQ works well, though I have not made a build with them myself (yet).

Edit: IceQ blower only, not to be confused with their IceQ X and IceQ X2.
 
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I have two non reference 7950 crossfired, WF3 (3 fans) and Dual-X (2 fans). Case is a Corsair obsidian 650D so airflow is really good. I have about 1in between both cards and temps are always below 70 when gaming (max I've seen is ~67) for both cards.
 
Thanks for the responses. Will definitely crossfire at some stage and this info is gold.
 
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