290X temps

I know the R9-290X can get hot, but what temps are safe for the VRM?

For starts I have the Asus 290X Direct CUII GPU in crossfire, when playing Diablo III maxed settings at 4K I get some pretty hot VRM on the 2nd card, I know part of it is cause there is something wrong with the Bios or GPU Tweak utility not applying the fan profile I have set up, it keeps the primary card fairly cool. Cards are on the Asus air coolers, will go to water in the near future, but I will also be lowering resolution for games, not gonna play at 4K, looks nice though, and pretty darned smooth say for some really heavy fight scenes, when 4 people are in party and more than 50+ mobs, which in D3 happens a lot, but it's not unplayable in the least.

Question, is there a way to change the fan profile on the second card so that it uses the fan profile I made for the primary card? I haven't tried Afterburner, but I tried another program other than GPUTweak, same results, fan profile only applied to primary card, secondary runs from the predefined Bios fan profile I am guessing? I know that I'm not getting the full potential from these cards with the current CPU and lack of proper PCI 3.0. When gaming I do have this (for lack of a better word) hick-up in the fps, they are steady at 60+ and then for no apparent reason they drop to 20, can be running in around in an empty zone of the game and it will just sort of stall for a split second. Doesn't matter what game it is, even happens on benchmarks. I do understand that as data gets calculated it could bottleneck somewhere in the system and as the load lessens it will steady out, is this because I have too much GPU for such a slow CPU, or is there something else happening? I guess I could remove one of the cards and test to see if that changes anything, but what else would I do to find where the bottleneck is occurring and how to alleviate the problem?



Should be all the info needed other than all the other progs running in the back ground, which it would be the typical normal loading of windows services and what not. Proc is AMD-4350 @4.4Ghz.

Edit posted wrong screenshot.

A review of your Asus 290x stated they used the cooler designed for the GeForce GTX 780 Ti which is a larger GPU. That review showed the Asus VRM getting to 92 degrees C while other non-reference coolers stayed in the low 70s to high 80s. So from that, it appears that your card will run hot until you go to water cooling.

Ok, so the second cards high VRM temp could be a problem, it could also be a read error of the software program I use, I get some insane temps from time to time.

I did play some with one card, same game D3 for about 3 hours and the temps were much lower while still giving me 50-60fps at 4K (according to fraps, which I hear is a bad program to use). I tried it in another game FF14 and only got 20-30fps at 4K not playable, jump to as high as 40 in unpopulated zones and high 40s if I stared at the sky, so there is definatly a boost in FF14 when using dual gpu, but D3 seems to create more heat than improve performance.