Overheating SLI eVGA 7800 GTX KO Edition - Anything I can do besides strapping a fan?

Overheating SLI eVGA 7800 GTX KO Edition - Anything I can do besides strapping a fan?

I've got 2 eVGA 7800 GTX KO's and the top one runs 4-8° hotter than the bottom one at idle and A LOT more at load. I assume it's natural for the top one to be hotter as it catches the heat from the bottom one. But my deal is that I was playing FEAR (at 16x12 MAX settings) and all was fine then all of the sudden it froze. By the time I reset and rebooted the top vid card was at almost 100°C !!! And that was after a reboot!... which was probably only 30 seconds or so...but still....I'm sure the temp dropped a lot in that ammount of time.

I've got 4 120mmx38mm Fans pumping quite a drafty ammount of air through this Stacker 830. So much that I have to blow off the front of the case every other day (my house is waaay dusty ) Now I'm not sure how much of that makes it's way by the Vid cards...but is there anything I can do besides mounting a fan over them? The case looks so beautiful lit up, with the blue UV and UV Water, through the side mesh that I would hate to have to stick a fan in there and ugly it up.

I'm only planning on keeping these cards until the first week or two of March when I will be "stepping-up" to the latest and greatest...and will then be water cooling.

Right now I have the cards clocked at 470/1.2Ghz and I haven't had too much of a problem (although I haven't played a whole lot of FEAR, which I believe is my most graphics intensive game) I just played BF2 at 16x12 with MAX settings for like 3 hours and it was like butter the whole time.
BUT I hate the thought of these "guaranteed to clock @ 490/1.3" cards having to be UNDERCLOCKED ...I mean sheesh...this is OVERclockers.com not UNDER!@#

BTW I'm idling at 52°C (Bottom) / 57°C (Top) right now ...and I've been in 2D for like an hour now. ...that SEEEMs hot to me...but I don't know for sure.

Any Advice? (And I don't want to have to stick a PCI cooler in there)

Thanks kids!

Well, short of upgrading your cooling solution either via more fans, or better heatsinks, or going to water, you are SOL for now. However if you plan on stepping up and cooling the next cards you get with water you'll be set!
The boards will survive 100C for the length of time you're concerned. I doubt you'll see any sucessful overclocks but just be grateful if they remain stable!

I say rig up a fan untill you step-up and watercool.

Check how much dust is on the GPU coolers.

On the coolermaster site, it says 9 120s can fit in that case, maybe consider more?

Revivalist said:

Do you have a side panel fan pulling in cool air?

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No, no fan...that was sort of a concern was keeping the "view" looking pretty

I don't know...maybe I'll just keep running underclocked until I Stepup .... at underclocked speeds games still run smooth at 16x12 ....so I guess I'll be ok

On a quasi-side-note:
I'm guessing that by the date at which I have to Stepup (like March 10th, I think) the 7900's won't be available yet (but I sure hope they are!)...so I'll have to go with the 7800 GTX 512MB. I kinda want to go with danger den's full card coolers (the NV78-SLI). But I'm wondering with that dumping that much more energy in the water....will it drastically affect my CPU OC?

disk11 said:

Check how much dust is on the GPU coolers.

On the coolermaster site, it says 9 120s can fit in that case, maybe consider more?

Click to expand...

I just dusted them like a week or so ago and this case has basic filters keeping out the majority of the dust (at least the big stuff) But they are less than a month old anyway, so I'd hope that wasn't the problem.

But yeah....they ran this way out of the boxes.

I can fit more fans in here but that requires putting the side fan holder back in....which messes up my view

Is the heatsink even attached? 100c seems insane. Even the crappiest heatsink in the world with poor caseflow should do better.

Revivalist said:

With a BIP II and silent fans, my guess is that it will. But I've only had experience with my BIX III and 6 Panaflos on it. Temps took a slight hit (like 2-3C) when I added a 7800GT with a 110W TEC. I'll be adding another 7800GT with a 110W TEC in a few weeks and I can report how much difference it made. . . .

By the way, do you have any pics posted of your rig?

Click to expand...

Cool...yeah let me know how things are affected.

And I don't have pics yet....I am planning on buying a good digital camera in the next week...so I'll be sure to post pics then!

Brando said:

Is the heatsink even attached? 100c seems insane. Even the crappiest heatsink in the world with poor caseflow should do better.

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I know...I can't believe that it runs that hot...I mean I could boil water with the thing

I've thought about talking to eVGA...maybe I should give them a call Monday and see what they say about it

They really shouldn't hit over 70c. The heatsinks must be making poor contact with the gpus. If I were you I'd take them apart (really easy to do) and re apply the thermal grease and put them back on. While this technically does void your warranty they'll never be able to tell unless you crush the core or some braindead thing like that. Also, if you don't have it already, download rivatuner and monitor the fan speed. They should ramp up to 3600 rpms under load, if not something is messed up (mine does not auto adjust for one reason or another). If you go into low level driver settings, you can force the fans to 100% speed all the time.

My setup is identical to yours less the 2nd card (and i have a triple radiator) and my card (on the reference cooler) only hits 58c under load @ 507/1360

eVGA says in their warranty that you can add on 3rd party coolers and water blocks so long you don't damage the hardware and reset it properly, so taking the stock sink off should be OK.

hmmm....well then maybe in that case I will remove it and see if I can stick AS5 on it