What a dramtic difference

I just go a couple 7900GT KO SC's, so I defintely wanted to test them out before I ripped the fans off to install the blocks. They were both idling at 48-50 and the freaking load temps were 92-94. I put the Maze 4's on these puppies and the idle is now down to 32 with load not even breaking 40.

I know w/c is good, but over a 50c drop? That's 122F. The KO's are supposed to have the better cooling too.

coulda been a bad heatsink mount... umm..

That's incredible

Those are clocked pretty high. Not out of the norm. My 7800 GTs would idle in the mid 40s to 50. And hit 68 to 72 full load. Put swifties on em and they are full load 38-39 with a crapy pump and rad. Idle around 32...

Had to back the RAM from 1580 to 1500 after I took the stock coolers off. The stock cooling covered the RAM and apparently does better than my copper sinks. All 3d mark tests ran fine with the stock cooling, but 3dmark 03was failing on me at Trolls Lare. The screen would just blank out or I had artifacts like crazy.. I know there are problems with some 7900GT's and if underclocking the memory to 1500 fixes my issue, I won't worry about an RMA.

I would guess that if I had the full coverage blocks, the 1580 would run fine. That's probably the problem with the Samsung memory on the cards. They are just oc so much, air can't cool them right.

get a pci slot fan if you have room to blow onto those sinks.

Couldn't use a PCI fan for the top card if I wanted to. I would think that the four fans off of the rad should blow enough air over them.

I doubt it is a cooling issue. May simply be a damaged card.... too much OC on the board buses, pci bus, damaged chip on the board, hot chip on the mobo... could be a number of things... go to stock speeds and see if it still occurs. stock on everything btw...

I got about a 35C drop in load temps on my 1900XTX...