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Xfire Card Layout

L

[L]imey

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2009
Messages
2,046
Hi Guys,

Question for those of you with any crossfire experience.. I have a pair of 7970's, 1 Asus DCU2, and 1 Sapphire Boost edition. Both have aftermarket coolers, so they don't exhaust out of the case.

The Asus is 3 slot, and the Sapphire is 2. Currently, I have the Sapphire on top in the configuration, because it allows a 1 slot gap between the cards. I did this expecting temps to be better. However, the Sapphire seems to have an inferior cooling setup compared to the Asus, and still pushes very high temps depending on the game. The fan on the Sapphire is by far the loudest thing in my case.


In it's current position as the slave card, the Asus fan barely comes on even under heavy load. I know the DCU2 cooling setup is very powerful, so I'm wondering if I might have better temperature spreads by reversing the card positions. I'll lose the gap, but the top card (always hotter from what I've read) will have the better cooling solution. When I ran the asus card solo, it was MUCH quieter than the sapphire is now.

If it matters, my case is a rosewill thor v2 and has stupidly massive airflow. 3 220mm fans and a 140.

Is my best bet just to benchmark the heat setup then reverse the cards and repeat?

I should also mention that the Asus card clocks up to 1125/1550 with no problem, while the sapphire kind of stops around 1050/1500. Will having the primary card be faster make a difference?

Thanks for your input.

-Limey
 
Seems like you already know the answer to this: Swap the cards and test over a variety of games while monitoring temps, noise and performance.
 
Was just wondering about anyone else's experience... no worries though, sounds like a good project for Thursday night when the wife is gone.
 
Try both positions but either way use TRIXX to undervolt the Sapphire. I'm running at 1000/1500/1075mv and temps are around 61C. You can use TRIXX to manually fix the fan speed to whatever is quiet enough, I have one at 50% right next to me and I can't hear it over the other case fans. If your box is fairly quiet you can try 40%. This won't affect cooling as much as you think, especially undervolted. It runs at 76C at the factory 1250mv and uses 70W more power.

If your card won't do those settings, maybe 980/1080mv? Whatever works.
 
Have you re-applied the TIM on either of the cards? Stock the cards come with super crappy TIM. Should be able to drop an easy 5-10c under load.
 
Thanks foosh I hadn't heard about under voting the sapphire... I will drop it down and see if it helps
 
Yeah cyclone the Sapphire has new paste, it definitely helped. I wish I could have gotten the aio mod to work on the card but it never flushed out. I will mess with repositioning the cards on Thursday.
 
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