What temps should GTX980 SLI be running at?

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Blackstone

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Mar 8, 2007
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See my signature. Plenty of room between cards. Cards are hitting 80 degrees and throttling at that temperature. I am assuming they are capable of more if they were cooled better, not that I need more performance.

Is the fact that they are topping out at 80 indicative that they are not being cooled properly? I am not using a custom fan curve.
 
Fans should be ramping up to full before throttling. I would set a custom fan curve. Maybe replace the TIM as well.
 
then make a custom (and aggressive) fan curve profile, that's the first step when talking about SLI/Xfire cards.. second taking in consideration your case i would also start to check cooling improvement Remove HDD cage to feed more fresh air directly to the GPUs.. you can remove the upper HDD cage and mount an additional 120mm fan over the lower HDD cage that will improve a lot the temperatures of the cards..
 
Araxie said:
then make a custom (and aggressive) fan curve profile, that's the first step when talking about SLI/Xfire cards.. second taking in consideration your case i would also start to check cooling improvement Remove HDD cage to feed more fresh air directly to the GPUs.. you can remove the upper HDD cage and mount an additional 120mm fan over the lower HDD cage that will improve a lot the temperatures of the cards..
Click to expand...

I did pull that top cage out. Are you saying add another front intake above the bottom cage or just a fan?
 
this example would help to what I mean... you can mount a fan over the cage to provide more air to the GPUs, Ziptied, duplex tape, etc.. you can be creative..

5y9od0.jpg
 
I am using MSI 980 4G Gaming cards in SLI and I had to get 3 Noctua{140mm} industrial exhaust fans and 3 standard Noctua{120mm} fans for the setup to keep the heat under control.

Had the same problem, but only with the first primary card, because it was sucking up all the heat from the 2nd card, the 2nd card was fine, only 67c tops.

So now, I have 2 fans inside the case like the pic above blowing the heat out of that section, I have 1 fan on the bottom shooting air up, and then 3 Noctua Industrial fans doing the exhaust, two on top and one on the back.

after the fans installed, I am getting 68c on the primary card and 60c on the 2nd card, happy as hell at 1.4ghz on both cards.
 
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yeah i set a custom fan curve and temps are now closer to 60 with no artifacts. . Just using aggressive profile through precision. What a difference. Your solution adding the extra case fans is lrobably quieter be ause the cards have a bit of a jet engine tuing going nkw. Heat may be the issue afterall.
 
A card is not considered "throttling" unless its core clock has dropped below the stated base clock. Just because it's not hitting its full Boost clock does not mean it's throttling.

I take it you have the reference versions of the 980? Yeah, the default fan curve on these try to strike a compromise between cooling performance and noise level. Unfortunately that means they top out around 60% fan speed even if your cards start to wander above the thermal threshold of 84C, at which point they may start to actually throttle. Since it is a blower it requires a consant and speedy amount of airflow to keep the components cool. I'm considering getting an AIO cooler for my TITAN X, myself, since the blower can get pretty damned loud. Just a shame I'll have to lose that sexy graphite-colored magnesium shroud in the process...
 
I am running two 980 SC (reference design) in SLI and I average about 76 during normal game play on both cards. Even with the SC BIOS, my cards seem to always run at 1326.

Now my setup has my cards sitting vertically not horizontally.

What style cooler is on your cards, I don't think you mentioned if these are reference or ACX style.
 
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