Keeping crossfire 6970's cool

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B2BigAl

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 23, 2003
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My 6970's are burning up, I've had them overheat on me a couple times already. Besides watercooling, is there anything you guys have done to help keep your cards cool? My antec p180 case has OK airflow, but there's not much more I can do to improve it. I thought about pulling the coolers off and putting some better thermal paste on, but I kind of hate to void my warranty. Not sure if that would even help much anyways. So, if you've got any tips, I'd like to hear them.

Was going to put this in the cooling forum, but I thought I might get better feedback here. Mods, if you need to move this thread, go for it.
 
Have you played with a custom fan curve in Afterburner or manually increased your fan speed in CCC? Stock 6970's really shouldn't require water cooling.
 
If you don't want to tinker with the physical cards, get msi afterburner and crank the fan speed up manually or tie one or two 120 mm fan next to the GPU.

If you are willing to tinker with them, get a couple of Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme I or II and slap them on. They are the 2nd best after market air cooler around (beside the Thermalright Shaman) and still allow SLI (assuming you have 3 slots between 2 PCI-E lanes).
 
-Sn1PeR- said:
Have you played with a custom fan curve in Afterburner or manually increased your fan speed in CCC? Stock 6970's really shouldn't require water cooling.
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I agree, but these things are just getting way too hot. I never had this problem with my 4870's I had in cf (same case and everything), and when it was just the single 6970 it was fine as well. I can crank up the fan speed in CCC, but I dont want the extra noise, these little buggers are loud enough as it is.

If you are willing to tinker with them, get a couple of Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme I or II and slap them on. They are the 2nd best after market air cooler around (beside the Thermalright Shaman) and still allow SLI (assuming you have 3 slots between 2 PCI-E lanes).
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I'll have to look and see if I can move my second card down a slot. If not, I may just have to resort to ghetto modding a 120mm fan to the side of the cards to get me by. I think I'm going to go back to a single card setup when the next gen cards come out. Between the shoddy driver support and the excessive heat (not to mention the price tag), CF has just been more trouble than it's worth.
 
I feel your pain - going through the same issues with my 6950CF rig. I also had 4870CF in my computer case (Lian-Li PC-201B) and it worked fine. One of my cards is an ASUS EAH6950 DCII 2GB so it is already 3 slots wide and unfortunately my motherboard (P5E) has only 2 PCI-E slots with 2 slots between them so it is nearly touching the other 6950 (XFX dual-slot). I tried swapping the cards around which cooled the ASUS a great deal but the XFX started hitting 100C despite having a gap between the cards *AND* cutting two 120mm blowholes in the top of the case *AND* installing a 120mm front case fan in front of the video cards *AND* a 120mm side fan on top of the video cards blowing hot air out. That XFX card really insists on good clear airflow - I shudder to think what would have happened if I had 2 XFX in CrossFire instead of my ASUS.

A decent cooler like the AXIIP doesn't address the VRM cooling problem well, especially on non-reference cards like the XFX. I spent all Saturday trying to rig up a VRM cooler for the XFX that would not interfere with a AXIIP, without much success - I may need a machine shop to crack this one because the resistors on the PCB are slightly *TALLER* than the VRMs. Small heatsinks don't work well enough, a single large heatsink like the one XFX installs is too tall so I am modifying a Zalman 4870 VRM heatsink to sit on the VRMs by shortening to 12mm high (to clear the AXIIP), cutting it down slightly to clear the CrossFire connector, drilling a hole in one end to match the screwholes in the PCB (XFX and others screw down this heatsink rather than rely on tape/glue), and cutting grooves in the bottom of the heatsink to clear the resistors - the stock VRM heatsink does exactly that. I don't want to carve up the XFX heatsink because I need it intact if I ever need to RMA this card again (done it twice already). What bugs me is that the 6950 non-reference design is actually the reference design for a 6870, but because the VRMs on a 6870 run a lot cooler nobody bothers to create a proper 3rd-party VRM heatsink for this design like Zalman and Thermalright did for 48xx/58xx series.

I was hoping to overclock my 6950's - the ASUS in particular has an excellent reputation with the stock cooler it comes with. Right now I'm just hoping to make the darn thing WORK...
 
Jesus man, sounds like you're pretty deep in the weeds on this. I'm not ready to put that much work into it, but I admire your determination. My HIS card runs really hot, my powercolor on the other hand never gave me any trouble. I wish someone made just a watercooling kit for graphics cards, like the little antec and corsair kits, that would be ideal.

I did order a drive bay cooler that essentially turns three of your drive bays into another 120mm case fan. I'm hoping if I get some more airflow coming in, it might help a little bit.
 
B2BigAl said:
Jesus man, sounds like you're pretty deep in the weeds on this. I'm not ready to put that much work into it, but I admire your determination. My HIS card runs really hot, my powercolor on the other hand never gave me any trouble. I wish someone made just a watercooling kit for graphics cards, like the little antec and corsair kits, that would be ideal.

I did order a drive bay cooler that essentially turns three of your drive bays into another 120mm case fan. I'm hoping if I get some more airflow coming in, it might help a little bit.
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Some company did in fact start making and/or marketing H70-esque coolers for video cards. I remember reading about it in CPU Magazine a month or two ago.

OP, the P180 is a case designed for silence, not performance. Its cooling capability is pretty poor compared to modern enthusiast cases, to be honest with you. Your best bet is to get one of those Silverstone 90-degree rotated ATX cases like the FT02. Silverstone stuff is priced ridiculously, though.
 
hv43082 said:
If you don't want to tinker with the physical cards, get msi afterburner and crank the fan speed up manually or tie one or two 120 mm fan next to the GPU.
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Why do that when CCC already has manual fan control override?
 
Matrices said:
Some company did in fact start making and/or marketing H70-esque coolers for video cards. I remember reading about it in CPU Magazine a month or two ago.

OP, the P180 is a case designed for silence, not performance. Its cooling capability is pretty poor compared to modern enthusiast cases, to be honest with you. Your best bet is to get one of those Silverstone 90-degree rotated ATX cases like the FT02. Silverstone stuff is priced ridiculously, though.
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Cool, I'll have to look for that, cause that would be perfect.

I know the p180 isn't a great cooling case, but I've had it for a while and I really like it. So I'd hate to get rid of it. The ft02 is a damn nice case, but at $250, they've lost their minds.
 
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