Tip for Air Cooling GTX 280 easily

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b00gjuice

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 3, 2006
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Here is a link to a thread I started on the evga forums about how I found out how to easily cool my GTX280:

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=466903&mpage=1&key=��

However, to sum up:

The GTX280 has intake ports at the front of the card, if there is a heat source right by these intake ports, the card will run very hot regardless of side/exit/intake fan speeds. If you remove the heat source so that cool air can draw in at the front, the card will run at very good temps.

In my case, I had the intake fan blowing over 3 WD HDD's with that heated air being sucked right into my GTX280 causing high temps. Nothing I did with speeding up side/exit/intake fans, etc would help. I moved my hard drives up above in the drive bays using rails, and then I had a drastic drop in temps. I went from 95C plaing crysis to never going over 80C after moving my HDD's up. And I live in PHX AZ so my computer den is always about 80 deg F in the summer. Several other users have confirmed my results if you read the thread.

This fix does not relate to an issue where your card immediately ramps up to over 100C regardless of airflow and needs RMA.

BTW, the GTX 280 is an awesome single GPU card and you don't have to worry about the SLI/Crossfire hassles (like vsync negating performance) with an X2 card.
 
Nice tip! Thanks for sharing that. I see this becoming more and more of an issue as the cards get more power hungry and faster. Maybe one day we'll see mini A/C units on cases. lol.

 
Wow thanks! Due to your tip I managed to lower the temp and raise my shader clock from 1466 to 1512. :cool:
 
don't put a card right above a gtx 280 (evga at least). the card will block some vents and increase the gpu temps.
 
I guess in the future, fabricating some sort of air vent directly to a video card's fan is gonna be standard operating procedure.
 
nomad8u said:
Nice tip! Thanks for sharing that. I see this becoming more and more of an issue as the cards get more power hungry and faster. Maybe one day we'll see mini A/C units on cases. lol.

Click to expand...

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?MfrId=1296&CatId=32

Just so you know....it sucks (it's not really traditional "AC"). But they do have refrigeration systems for CPUs, google Vapochill.

They really just need to find some better materials to make transistors and insulators out of, so they don't leak so much (that's what causes heat and requires power).
 
Excellent point here sir, I think this just might get me a higher OC on my cards here until I snag a 4870.
 
Yes, this is a good thing as my COSMOS case actually is a bit hot, but the nice thing is there is a fan on the bottom of the case I can direct right at the vid card. Still seeing stock temps though with this set up, idle in high 50's and load at 75 normal games or 80's for crysis. Top temp is 87C running furmark 10 minutes.

edit: LOL, that is funny crysis is such a benchmark for vid cards; killer graphics though.
 
While I don't have enough room in my case to do the changes suggested, I did move one of my hard drives up on top of my dvd burner to remove some of the hot air my GTX 260 pulls in. I also zip-tied an 80mm fan inside the now somewhat open hard drive cage. The fan can't get much air to the card because the hard drive bay has such small holes.

However, both of my hard drives dropped 8-10C in temp, and my card dropped about 2-3C so it did help a little bit :)
 
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