My 7900GTX is runing hot

[MAD450r]

Hello I have many issues on this pc last month when I purchased a new video card for this pc it just plain reboots this pc randomly so im stuck back on my 7900gtx. I am looking for something faster that will run on this machine my 780gtx was too much for the 2 power supplys I currently own. Im guessing thats what was rebooting this pc cause i tried everything from clean installs to flashing many bios's on the mb and you name it I tried it.

So my question now is. How can I cool this damn 7900gtx. I have an aftermarket zulman cooler on it that helped very much with every other game I try. I play POE and it just instantly puts load on card at 98% even with everything in game at lowest possible setting just so I can try play but still get horrible lag sometimes or just plain jerks and skips im guessing from card being so hot. I'll post pic or two in this post so you can see.

I do have my qx9650 overclocked to 3.3ghz per core not much over and its running cool I think I can go more but till I get graphics set better I dont want to push it. I know many will say get a new mb and i7, but I would have to spend close to 1000$ on cpu alone to improve over this cpus 4core 12 megs cache, for multitasking and gaming its smooth. I had it at stock speeds with the 780 in here just so you know, and it was awesome till the random poof its rebooting. It would go hours sometimes and seconds the other times before I finally gave up on this gigabyte with that card.

EDIT: in last pic you can still see the desk fan I had helping try to keep the damn 7900gtx cool on floor under desk pointing at pc, the 780 runs super cool and ultra quiet on my 1680x1080 3 monitors. Im legally blind is why I wont ever go over that up and down resolution so my fonts stay at a readable size for me.

 

[wagex]

hmmm... 86c is pretty warm for older cards... have you thought about updating it a little? if that is out of the question could you give a pic of the inside of the case maybe its just not getting enough air flow?

 

[GTXJackBauer]

Yeah, older cases aren't as sufficient in air cooling as they are now.

I am a little confused with your comments about replacing the 780 with the 7900? Did I get that correct? You had 2 PSU's connected to the system to power it up with the 780 installed and kept rebooting?
Now you have heat issues with the older replaced card?

If I am pace with your story than I would think you need a new case and PSU to handle the 780 or case cause the 780 is overheating but than again the card is made to throttle and has built-in thermal protection. It will down clock itself OR it wasn't getting enough power. Looks like even the 7900 isn't getting cool air. The case looks like the culprit for the 7900 and the 780s the PSU's and case are both the suspects.

It's also possible your gear is so old that your MB needs a updated BIOS and its highly possible they stopped doing updates on that MB years ago. Even the newer boards needed a BIOS update for the 780 which folks said they had the same symptoms as you, but nonetheless I wouldn't be installing a GTX 780 on a system like that. It's too old and you're bottlenecking the hell out of its full potential. For that resolution in surround, you'd run almost anything on ultra but not on that system.

 

[MAD450r]

ok here to clarify this

I started out with this 7900gtx in this pc my gigabyte motherboard. I bought the gigabyte 780GTX to install on here.

This gigabyte pc is in a full tower case it has 1 power supply an antec truepower 2.0 gold certified, but is only 550watt. I then after reading the new videocard the 780 that was rebooting randomly on this pc needs 600watt, so I purchased a 600watt seasonic cheapest name brand ps I could find locally. It reboots the same if not more often.

so I had to put the 780 in a different pc my server. It works perfectly there.
In the second pc I also have an older lga775 q9550 [draws less watts than the qx9650] its on an MSI x48c platinum so its got different chipset and it currently has ddr3 ram and since I had so much in that pc it has a better power supply a 700 watt ocz all on one rail im guessing is the main reason the 780 works ok here. in the same inwin q500b full tower case runs nice and cool even with all these hard drives. Has 2 intake fans I modded the server case and mounted the same 120mm I run in the gigabyte case onto the side pannel in the server, so the stock location of the case still has an 80mm also intaking air. So that helps too but im sure its not a heat thing.


EDIT: here is a quick cellphone pic of my messy full tower with 120 MM fan intake and 2 exhaust 80mm as well as the ps.

here is 3 pics one with the 780 in here and the other 2 from up here with the 7900



so back in this gigabyte pc with the old 7900gtx, I wanted to find a way to cool this card more, or replace it with something between the 7900gtx and the 700$ 780gtx I bought for this pc and cant return for lower model.

I was looking at 670 or 760 for about 250-300$ but I want it to run on the antec 550watt ps since the seasonic is horribly loud compared to the antec.

 

[GTXJackBauer]

Oh I see. Thanks for the clarification. That's a bummer. Seasonics are great but must've not been enough amps on the main rail.

 

[MAD450r]

from what I read its exactly that, cause my antec, has 19watts per rail and has 2, the seasonic has 2 rails also is the problem and its 18amp and 20amp still same 38amp total.

but for the case both pc's are in inwin q500 revision b and in fact the server is packed full of hard drives and yet the 780 works great and runs super cool in that same case.

as for bios's tried that

 

[MAD450r]

as for overheating nope the cpu runs damn cool and for bottlenecking my qx9650 with 12 megs cache is nowhere near a bottleneck, second the 780 never overheated its topped out at 43c so far under game load.

as for the bios I read all those posts looking for help all the guys that needed bios updates for this 780 were getting bsod's not just reboot that software says power failure no other error report. But I did update to latest bios to test and no change on this board
.

the mainboard is not running warm at all and has been rock solid other than this one game with the 780 installed.

Just to show you im not bottlenecked by my cpu my good freinds alenware is here for a cleaning he has 2x580s on his and im still getting higher framerates than he does with his i7. again do to less cash per core.

 

[GTXJackBauer]

What are you using as an example that beats him as in benchmarks/software/resolution and graphic settings?

 

[RnRollie]

i'ld say to try with a decent 800W PSU
The total load is probably just in the twilight zone, and the 780 might be pulling it over the edge... which is weird as it should be less "hungry" as the 7900
It all depends a bit on what other stuff you have.... not running Delta fans of the MB headers are you?
Also, the current PSU.. does it have "dedicated" PCI cables for the GPU, or are you running one of those "splitters" of a molex?


In any case why spend +200 on a 670 (or something) if you can spend that on a decent PSU?

Oh, and set PCI Spread Spectrum (or similar if exists) to Disabled in BIOS

 

[EarthDog]

7900GTX is, surprisingly, 84W. The 780 uses a TON more power (250W).

I would bet money says that the Q9650 is holding the 780 back. Comparing FPS on a completely different system with completely different cards doesn't prove a thing. It has nothing to do with cache or cache per core either. Overclock your CPU and see if the FPS go up significantly. The temperature of the 780 though, 43C under a gaming load? That tells me it could be held back by the CPU. For stock air, that temperature seems VERY low unless you room is around 15C, LOL!

EDIT: Check this link out. With slower cards and newer/faster processors than a Q96/9550, there is a small to significant bottleneck on high end cards..: http://us.hardware.info/reviews/371...rce-gtx-680-tested-with-10-cpus-dirt-showdown

 

[wagex]

yea having the power split like that is probably not too well considering 18a @ 12v is only 216w and 20a is only 240w thats not including efficiency or anything of the sorts and iirc 780 can pull 230w stock so that is pushing it, id say a single rail 550w would be fine 600 to be safe. you need to have probably 25A on the 12vrail that powers the pci connectors. or close to a 40a single 12v rail

edit:

7900GTX is, surprisingly, 84W. The 780 uses a TON more power (250W).

I would bet money says that the Q9650 is holding the 780 back. Comparing FPS on a completely different system with completely different cards doesn't prove a thing. Overclock your CPU and see if the FPS go up significantly. The temperature of the 780 though, 43C under a gaming load? That tells me it could be held back by the CPU. For stock air, that temperature is VERY low unless you room is around 15C, LOL!

you beat me too it but he said the 780 is causing random restarts.

 

[Theocnoob]

as for overheating nope the cpu runs damn cool and for bottlenecking my qx9650 with 12 megs cache is nowhere near a bottleneck, second the 780 never overheated its topped out at 43c so far under game load.

as for the bios I read all those posts looking for help all the guys that needed bios updates for this 780 were getting bsod's not just reboot that software says power failure no other error report. But I did update to latest bios to test and no change on this board
.

the mainboard is not running warm at all and has been rock solid other than this one game with the 780 installed.

Just to show you im not bottlenecked by my cpu my good freinds alenware is here for a cleaning he has 2x580s on his and im still getting higher framerates than he does with his i7. again do to less cash per core.

Cache does NOT equate to higher CPU performance. A modern i5 with 6MB of cache would murder your Core 2 Quad with 12 megs of cache. Your friend's Alienware probably just isn't configured properly.

Your old cpu IS a bottleneck for a 780. You just haven't found a sufficiently CPU intensive game to hand your CPU it's arse .

A 4670K is DOUBLE the performance of your CPU. And it only has 6MB of cache.

 

[wagex]

HIS CPU IS NOT GOING TO SUCH A BOTTLE NECK TO MAKE IT REBOOOOOOOOOOOOT.

WILL IT BOTTLENECKS? YES MENS IT WILL, BUT IT ISNT CAUZING EH REBOOTZ.

18A AND 20A NOT ENOUGH AMPZ TO HANDLE DEH 780. NEW PSU = PROBLEMZ SOLVED.

AS FOR COOLING THE 7900 PROBABLY REPLACE tim ON THE BLOCK.
OR JUST GET A NEW PSU AND USE THE 780.

EDIT: oops sorry caps.

 

[Theocnoob]

HIS CPU IS NOT GOING TO SUCH A BOTTLE NECK TO MAKE IT REBOOOOOOOOOOOOT.

I agree with that. But it is still a bottleneck. Just pointing that out. It's definitely not making the system reboot.

18A AND 20A NOT ENOUGH AMPZ TO HANDLE DEH 780. NEW PSU = PROBLEMZ SOLVED.

Definitely not enough amps. No.
You scream the truth, caps man.

 

[EarthDog]

If it was one rail.. I'd run it on a quality PSU...

Who knows though. A lot of 'dual rail' PSUs are actually single rails as there is no OCP on them allowing each rail to use the entire amperage available.

 

[wagex]

idk i think seasonic would be accurate with ocp on each rail antec meh who knows

 

[MAD450r]

quality psu ?

My antec is a gold certified psu I paid about 150$ for it years ago,

my new seasonic was 55$ and tis garbage if you ask me

my server has, where the 780 is now has an ocz 700watt psu and the 780 is rock solid


as for what I tested fps with is the game that is causing me the headaches. POE [path of exile]. I tried both on my triple 20 inch 1680x1050 displays that I game on pllaying with both set to max settings the game offers and at my monitors max res. And my 780 on my 9650 was getting somewhere around 140fps and my freindss i7 based processorc not sure of the exact model. its running overclocked from dell at 3.4ghz per core and he has two 580s in sli, it will not break 100fps no matter what I try.

as for load time on this game, its slow loading on all machines, but my supposidly bottlenecked cpu loads the game about 3 seconds faster and it loads windows 5 seconds faster. So I see it as my cpu is faster no matter how you look at it.

We both have the same SSD for OS 128gb vertex 3s,

my system has a caching drive as well and I also have now 8 drives in my system as well that others in my house steam movies and tv from randomly as well and that too should make me slower than his pc but its not.

I tried a few other older games where we were about identical on load times and stuff
Quake1 with OPENGL update, tried quake 2 as well where my older pc beats it again.

as for temps his has watercooled cpu and runs about 55c about gaming on cpus hottest core. Mine you seen runs cooler than that on air. This is the reason he brought it to me to clean out the case and reseat his watercooler block. I put new thermal paste which dropped his temps another 2-3 c but still his runs hotter and slower than my 775 based board.

 

[wagex]

you can have a 1000000 watt psu if the rail the 780 is on cant handle like 30 amps then it aint gonna work.

the gold/silver/bronze certs really mean nothing there have been bronze psu's that fail the spec at like 50% load or less.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

you can have a 1000000 watt psu if the rail the 780 is on cant handle like 30 amps then it aint gonna work.

the gold/silver/bronze certs really mean nothing there have been bronze psu's that fail the spec at like 50% load or less.

This +1000
I had the same issue with my 770 when I got it. Used to have a multi-rail PSU, couldn't hold up to an OC on the 770 because the rail would cut off.

 

[MAD450r]

I agree 100% now that i've gone through all this and ended up loosing my fileserver to gaming for the 780.

Its running beautifully on my OCZ 700watt power supply. I got it cheaper than it selling here at newegg but here is the ps it works great on.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341018