My GTX280: Read if you have Heating Problems

O

oozish

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 27, 2003
Messages
1,465
Hi,

Some of you may have read my posts lately regarding aftermarket cooling for both the 4870 and the 260. I have had nothing but trouble with the 4870 regarding how HOT it gets and heating up my room...you can read people making fun of my comments in the ATI forum in general attacking me personally because I returned that card cause it was so hot; it got up to about 103/104C!

Well, after all that I thought, "maybe I was wrong, that 4870 is alot of bang for my buck....I guess I'll try again"....so I bought another 4870 and it was exactly the same. So, me being a long time nvidia owner anyway, I said, well, screw it....if nvidia makes a more stable and better put together card with more attention to noise and heat, I'll try that....

So I started thinking about getting a 260. Then I said, I might as well get the 280 cause I want as big a difference as possible and to me the 150 difference isn't enough to worry about long term. Excited, I headed to the local frys to get my 280 after reading some reviews and seeing temps pretty low compared to my 4870 experience.

Well, I got the EVGA 280 and fired it up, played crysis for about 2 minutes and the thing was at 102C! oh boy. I experimented with it before returning it and I bought a BFG 280 oc and another EVGA.

With the BFG in, I fired it up and played crysis (that game will get these cards hotter than furmark in my experience) and the same thing.

"I might as well not even try the other box" I thought. But since I bought it just to try, of course I did. ;) With my final card in there, I started things up and opened the precision monitor....well, weird, I've never even seen temps in the 50's before! Also, it's leveling out around 69C.

Now I know some of you may think that's high idle, but I have a cosmos case and it's loaded with fans in everyplace they meant for them to be and that's as good as it gets for airflow. The point is, it wasn't idling in the high 70's. Ok, good start!
TEMPS:
Started Crysis and low and behold, with the fan charging up to about 90%, the card never breaks around 82C-83C! this is great! I played team fortress 2, which on the 4870 brought me temps of 102C, and the 280 didn't get over about 76C; WOW!
FAN:
Another thing, the fan on the 280 is SO much better than the 4870; which sounds horrible and way loud. This fan is very tolerable, more of a whooshing sound and it blends right in. Right now, it's running at 41% idle, the temp is 68.

So my whole point is, if you have one of these cards that shoots up to 100+C, if you can, return it as you CAN find a card that will run alot cooler. If you can buy locally, do so. I really think the best idea is to take your credit card to a place that sells these things with a good return policy and buy 3, if the first one is good, fine, return the other unopened. I think the 100C problems people are seeing are just chips that aren't that good...too bad since it doesn't say alot for quality assurance, but the bottom line is you can get a great card that runs relatively cool if you look hard enough. I'm content with these temps and I'm really happy with this 280.

Here's to morning typing! Have a nice day! :D
 
I also have a Cosmos S case and am running the BFG GTX280 OC. On air, I had about the same temps as your "good" card. I am now running it on water in the loop with my cpu and the card idles in the high 30's and has yet to break 60 at load. When i removed the stock heatsink, I was amazed that it was running as cool as it was because of all the crap on it. I think it's very possible that alot of these high temps are due more to poor heatsink installs than any difference in the chips. Of course there's also the issue of the power saving features not working on Intel chipsets contributing to the problem.
 
anr11 said:
I also have a Cosmos S case and am running the BFG GTX280 OC. On air, I had about the same temps as your "good" card. I am now running it on water in the loop with my cpu and the card idles in the high 30's and has yet to break 60 at load.
Click to expand...

aH, That sounds like heaven!
 
I have a cosmos case too. However, I read about that whole 'negative air pressure' thing and it made me disable two of the fans; the original setup had one fan pulling in air, and 3 fans pushing air out of the case, now it's 1 in and 1 out, although apparantly it would be best with 2 in and 1 out.
 
Well I don't know how ATI got by with a single slot cooler for the HD 4850 one of my friends has really good airflow in his case and it got as high as 89C... be bought an aftermarket cooler from Newegg and it dropped as much as 30C.

Stock coolers are pretty bad IMO. My 8800GS goes as high as 80C according to HWTemp which is ... well I really didn't expect it to run that hot.
 
Raap said:
I have a cosmos case too. However, I read about that whole 'negative air pressure' thing and it made me disable two of the fans; the original setup had one fan pulling in air, and 3 fans pushing air out of the case, now it's 1 in and 1 out, although apparantly it would be best with 2 in and 1 out.
Click to expand...

I've tried all combinations, and in reality I found my passive graphics card responded best to having the top 2 fans blowing out...it made about 8C difference in temps for passive, so that is showing the neg. air pressure is really working with 2 top blowing out and 1 back blowing out; I have 2 blowing in (1 over HD's and 1 on the bottom). Also I notice my mb temp is lower this way.

However, my CPU temps respond best by having the 2 top blowing DOWN on them; I might switch this around now that I don't have passive cooling going on....now that you got me thinking about it, lol. I hate turning those fans around, PITA.
 
oozish said:
Hi,

Some of you may have read my posts lately regarding aftermarket cooling for both the 4870 and the 260. I have had nothing but trouble with the 4870 regarding how HOT it gets and heating up my room...you can read people making fun of my comments in the ATI forum in general attacking me personally because I returned that card cause it was so hot; it got up to about 103/104C!

Well, after all that I thought, "maybe I was wrong, that 4870 is alot of bang for my buck....I guess I'll try again"....so I bought another 4870 and it was exactly the same. So, me being a long time nvidia owner anyway, I said, well, screw it....if nvidia makes a more stable and better put together card with more attention to noise and heat, I'll try that....

So I started thinking about getting a 260. Then I said, I might as well get the 280 cause I want as big a difference as possible and to me the 150 difference isn't enough to worry about long term. Excited, I headed to the local frys to get my 280 after reading some reviews and seeing temps pretty low compared to my 4870 experience.

Well, I got the EVGA 280 and fired it up, played crysis for about 2 minutes and the thing was at 102C! oh boy. I experimented with it before returning it and I bought a BFG 280 oc and another EVGA.

With the BFG in, I fired it up and played crysis (that game will get these cards hotter than furmark in my experience) and the same thing.

"I might as well not even try the other box" I thought. But since I bought it just to try, of course I did. ;) With my final card in there, I started things up and opened the precision monitor....well, weird, I've never even seen temps in the 50's before! Also, it's leveling out around 69C.

Now I know some of you may think that's high idle, but I have a cosmos case and it's loaded with fans in everyplace they meant for them to be and that's as good as it gets for airflow. The point is, it wasn't idling in the high 70's. Ok, good start!
TEMPS:
Started Crysis and low and behold, with the fan charging up to about 90%, the card never breaks around 82C-83C! this is great! I played team fortress 2, which on the 4870 brought me temps of 102C, and the 280 didn't get over about 76C; WOW!
FAN:
Another thing, the fan on the 280 is SO much better than the 4870; which sounds horrible and way loud. This fan is very tolerable, more of a whooshing sound and it blends right in. Right now, it's running at 41% idle, the temp is 68.

So my whole point is, if you have one of these cards that shoots up to 100+C, if you can, return it as you CAN find a card that will run alot cooler. If you can buy locally, do so. I really think the best idea is to take your credit card to a place that sells these things with a good return policy and buy 3, if the first one is good, fine, return the other unopened. I think the 100C problems people are seeing are just chips that aren't that good...too bad since it doesn't say alot for quality assurance, but the bottom line is you can get a great card that runs relatively cool if you look hard enough. I'm content with these temps and I'm really happy with this 280.

Here's to morning typing! Have a nice day! :D
Click to expand...

so to summarize ur uneccesarily long post is that, 4870 runs hotter and louder than 280, but the 280 u have 50/50 (lower or higher idk) chance of getting a card that runs either uber-hot and drags u down or u get a working card, see that wasn't so hard..
 
Both my first 280s ran great. I sent them back and saved $300 re-ordering them.
I'll post if the second two give any problems. :)
 
Uberbob102000 said:
You do know that that GTX 280 is putting MORE heat into your room right? ;)
Click to expand...

I had the 4870 for a while, it was Sapphire brand however, and it did run kind of hot, maybe 65c idle and 80c load temps. To the Op...did you adjust your fan speed in your CCC profile. Increasing the fan to a mere 30% gets the temps down to 60 c at load and maybe 46c idle. Stock fan on the 4870 is actually good enough in my experience as long as you adjust the fan.

GTX280 consumes more watts and therefore produces more heat...that cannot be denied. Your room should get hotter with the gtx280. If it doesn't, your special.:D
 
SX2233 said:
so to summarize ur uneccesarily long post is that, 4870 runs hotter and louder than 280, but the 280 u have 50/50 (lower or higher idk) chance of getting a card that runs either uber-hot and drags u down or u get a working card, see that wasn't so hard..
Click to expand...

hey, some people might enjoy reading a long post. Thanks for your cliff notes though. :D
 
I've noticed my system doesn't downclock. Does downclocking require nvidia board? My clocks stay the same regardless of desktop/3d. Hope this is a driver issue. Anyone else?
 
So what happened to the room overheating issues? The GTX280 at load throws out more heat than the 4870, even if you found one where the fan is better and keeps it cooler.

If the fan is working better, its just dumping the heat into the surrounding air faster, and therefore heating up your room faster.

Eventually for a given # of watts, the room would reach the same steady state temperature, which would be higher for a card that gives off more heat, as obvious as that sounds.
 
sethk: My room feels fine, maybe because more heat is in my case now, I don't know. I'm not worried about it since I want a next gen card I just don't want one that runs at 100C plus.

I've got a big discovery: The downclocking function of the card will TURN OFF if you're running dual view! I wonder if I should make a separate post about this as I think it's very important.

Anyway, the card won't downclock if you're running dual view. Turn on single view and it will downclock, YES! Glad I figured this out, it was really perplexing me. There's alot of talk about this in other forums I wonder if this is widely known?
 
BigCactus said:
Here you go, to help with your downclocking and overheating issues with the GTX280.

Downclocking issues:
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=421769

Overheating issues: (there were more but they tend to delete threads that make their products look bad)
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=462956
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=458499
Click to expand...

Thanks man but I think I got the downclocking thing figured out. It's working fine now that I've disabled dual monitors. Luckily just got a 24" HP.

Cheers!
 
oozish said:
sethk: My room feels fine, maybe because more heat is in my case now, I don't know. I'm not worried about it since I want a next gen card I just don't want one that runs at 100C plus.

I've got a big discovery: The downclocking function of the card will TURN OFF if you're running dual view! I wonder if I should make a separate post about this as I think it's very important.

Anyway, the card won't downclock if you're running dual view. Turn on single view and it will downclock, YES! Glad I figured this out, it was really perplexing me. There's alot of talk about this in other forums I wonder if this is widely known?
Click to expand...

wow! i was baffled by this, but now that i disabled dual monitors my bfg downclocks to 300 core clock and 100 memory clock. this is really odd though, it doesn't really make any sense. i sure hope this gets fixed with a driver revision or something
 
This blows. I hope it is fixed via a driver / BIOS update, because I always run dual monitor.
 
I personally don't believe it really matters that much.

Case in point.

My BFG GTX 280 OC would idle at 51C and reach load temps of 86C after an hour of gaming in Crysis.
I never once saw it hit 90+ outside of Furmark, and even then, it only hit 94C, which is respectable for that benchmark.

Besides that, my load temps in games were 80-84C, with idles as noted around 51-54C.

Well, 3 days later, it died.
Just like that.

I never overclocked it myself (factory OC'd by like 15 Mhz or thereabouts), nor do I have poor cooling in my case (5 fans, Thermaltake case), but nevertheless, the card just died on me, with or without the heat.

I mean, that's not to say that the heat can't contribute to a graphic cards early demise, but in my case, my GTX 280 died without the excessive heat that many people complain about.

I guess my point is that these things are a hit/miss, the GTX 280's that is.
It seems like a case of oversight on NV's behalf, perhaps like their 8400/8600 mobile GPU debacle which cost them $300 Million...and yes I know it's too soon to make such predictions but message boards all over are filled with people reporting that their GTX 280s are dying.

Chalk me up too, my first ever GPU failure in 15 years of system builds.
 
sethk said:
This blows. I hope it is fixed via a driver / BIOS update, because I always run dual monitor.
Click to expand...

This seems to me definately a driver issue and I think it ISN'T a hardware issue. When running dual monitors, somehow it thinks it's in 3d mode. Also, this is related to the clock downclocking in 3d games during the 2d interface. I expect the next set of official drivers could be the ones to fix it, let's hope so!
 
Just a few notes on my temps and my new evga superclocked 280:

670/1420/1200 (effectively the fastest overclocked card you can buy today for the core and not far off on the memory, ie, 670/1460/1215 is the asus GTX Top speed)
STABLE: 10 MINUTES OF ATI TOOL MAX TEMP IS 85

This is as far as I’ve tried, Looks like I could go farther.


At stock clocks I ran Furmark for 10 minutes; max temp hovered between 88 & 89 by the end of the test with fan on 100%; with fan on 80% it goes up a few degrees C.

Amazingly, running rthribl, the temps only got up to 73 @ 100%!

**Fan spins down slowly as temps stablilize @ low 60s.
Click to expand...

the card is noisy at 100% but really hardly any normal game, save maybe crysis, would ever drive it to that range. Normal gaming only drives the card temps to the 70's
 
Wierd thing i have noticed with my EVGA GTX280.

When I first got the card it was running close to 80 under load. After a few weeks my card is now running in the 60's under load. Last night I even saw high 50's. Im thinking there paste is curing.
 
Definitely not AS5. The stuff was more the consistency of Noctua NT-H1 and it's smeared on like there's no tomorrow.
 
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