Whats a good 6950 cooler upgrade?

[Outlawstar15a2]

I have two questions can a Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 6950 2GB have it's cooler updated? And if so what would be a good cooler to upgrade to over the stock cooler that it comes with?

My system specs are below:

Coolmaster Haf-X chassis (with default fans)
Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 6950 2GB VRAM
ASUS VW246H HDMI Monitor
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand TPG-1050M 1050W PSU
ASUS Crosshair V Formula mobo 990FX chipset
Seagate Constellation HDD ES ST500NM0011 (Operating System)
Hitachi GST Deskstar HDD 7k3000 HDS723020BLA642 (Games and personal files)
Toshiba PH3300U 1I72 HDD (Drive backups)
AMD Phenom 2 x6 1100T Black Edition CPU @ 3.31 GHz
16 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 (4x4) RAM
Soundblaster X-FI Titanium Fatality Champion

As for the reason, I want to update cause the card seems to have serious heat issues.

Also I have another question (please don't hit me!) What is the max temps for the Sapphire Toxic 6950's chipset? The card appears to overheat and turn itself off when playing Dead Island and Archeage however the board temp is fine. I don't know what the deal with Dead Island is but when I played Archeage the reported board temp was only 79 C. I updated my drivers to the latest non beta.... What are the max temps for the entire chipset?

 

[Mr.Scott]

http://www.performance-pcs.com/cata...oduct_info&cPath=54_196_692&products_id=29262
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=31470

 

[magellan]

The Arctic Cooling Accelero II Plus worked great for my 6950/6970. I was able to overclock my 6950/6970 like mad. I ended up removing the existing fan assembly and putting on more powerful fans. My 6950/6970 never went over 70 degrees C, no matter what the ambient temp or overclock.

 

[RnRollie]

http://www.performance-pcs.com/cata...t_info&cPath=59_971_240_578&products_id=30416

http://www.aquatuning.de/water-cool...eatkiller-gpu-x-69x0-hole-edition-ni-bl?c=495

http://www.performance-pcs.com/cata...t_info&cPath=59_971_240_579&products_id=32228

 

[Outlawstar15a2]

This would be the first time I'm opening a GPU to upgrade the cooler. What are the pitfalls I need to look out for and difficulties I'm going to encounter? I remember reading somewhere touching the capacitors will brick the card. What do the capacitors look like so I know what to avoid touching.

 

[EarthDog]

Id upgrade the GPU personally... that one may be getting a little long in the tooth, no? sell this one, put the $50 for the cooler to it and grab something better.

Touching the caps will not brick the cards.

 

[ASUS ROG]

Id upgrade the GPU personally... that one may be getting a little long in the tooth, no? sell this one, put the $50 for the cooler to it and grab something better.

Touching the caps will not brick the cards.

 

[magellan]

For my Arctic Cooling Accelero Extreme II Plus I remember I had to make sure the RAM sinks were oriented correctly by test fitting the heatsink, because they used thermal epoxy of some sort to bond to the RAM chips and so were permanently installed once attached.

 

[Outlawstar15a2]

I'd like to upgrade the card but I don't have that kind of money. The cooler alone is gonna hit my wallet hard. But it has to be done...

 

[magellan]

I'd like to upgrade the card but I don't have that kind of money. The cooler alone is gonna hit my wallet hard. But it has to be done...

My 6950 flashed to 6970 ran hotter than Satan's balls -- especially after
I maxed out the GPU Vcore w/BIOS mods. I never could've got the overclocks
I got out of it w/the stock cooler.

You should probably be able to get a good heatsink for pretty cheap for
at 6950 at this point.

Is your 6950 at least soft-moddable to a 6970?

If you can't soft mod your 6950 to a 6970 I'd probably just save my ducats
for a better video card. You have to be able to mod the BIOS to get any
decent overclocks out of a 6950 or 6970.

 

[Outlawstar15a2]

My 6950 flashed to 6970 ran hotter than Satan's balls -- especially after
I maxed out the GPU Vcore w/BIOS mods. I never could've got the overclocks
I got out of it w/the stock cooler.

You should probably be able to get a good heatsink for pretty cheap for
at 6950 at this point.

Is your 6950 at least soft-moddable to a 6970?

If you can't soft mod your 6950 to a 6970 I'd probably just save my ducats
for a better video card. You have to be able to mod the BIOS to get any
decent overclocks out of a 6950 or 6970.

I don't want to overclock it. I just want to be able to play Archeage without the system going down due to GPU overheating.

I will buy a new PC but right now I have to work out a way to finance one.

 

[EarthDog]

Have you cleaned out the card and reapply thermal paste?

Also if you have to finance a computer... Don't buy it. Save your money and don't live the American dream of debt.

 

[JLK03F150]

Have you used software like MSI Afterburner to ramp the fan RPMs higher than ATI's CCC wants to run the fan? ATI drivers don't run the fan to keep it cool, they run it to keep it quiet.

 

[EarthDog]

Fan profiles are handled by the bios... But still something worth looking at.

 

[JLK03F150]

Ah, didn't know the profile was in the BIOS (thought it was CCC or driver), but I do know you can mod the profile with Afterburner.

 

[EarthDog]

If it was the driver, all default profiles would be the same. It is editable by driver though (manual).

 

[Outlawstar15a2]

Have you cleaned out the card and reapply thermal paste?

Also if you have to finance a computer... Don't buy it. Save your money and don't live the American dream of debt.

No, though when I go to put the new cooler on it I can take care of that as well as the cooler should come with thermal paste. Right?

Have you used software like MSI Afterburner to ramp the fan RPMs higher than ATI's CCC wants to run the fan? ATI drivers don't run the fan to keep it cool, they run it to keep it quiet.

Yep, been using CCC to manually ramp up the fan speed since I found out on day 1 that automatic fan management on the card is crap.

What's bothering me is the problem only occurs in Archeage and Dead Island all my other games are perfectly fine. I played Final Fantasy 14 for close to a year and each time the GPU was under extreme load and riding the "thermal edge" and it performed fine. The other thing that's bothering me is MSI Afterburner reported a board temp of 79C when it crashed. Is it possible that VRAM or something itself overheated but the general temp for the entire board was good? Now when I work up the nerve to load Archeage in a little while I'm going to monitor the other temps HWINFO records on the card (Shader, VRM, etc). I setup alert temps of 85C and told it to alert me when it reaches that temp. I'm also going to create a running log before starting Archeage.

I did upgrade my driver from 13.9 to 14.4, at the end of the previous beta period, which is the latest non beta driver on the website. I'll check it again tonight.

 

[magellan]

IT makes sense that Archeage would cause problems, it's based on the Crysis 3 engine so I'd guess it puts a lot of load on your 6950.
Do you have good ventilation inside your case?

 

[EarthDog]

Perhaps try cleaning it before you spend money on a new cooler?

 

[Outlawstar15a2]

IT makes sense that Archeage would cause problems, it's based on the Crysis 3 engine so I'd guess it puts a lot of load on your 6950.
Do you have good ventilation inside your case?

The default fans on the HAF-X. Though next month I want to get a few more fans as well. However I need to know which fans to get as I have to maintain positive pressure but at the same time need to get fans that will actually do something.

Perhaps try cleaning it before you spend money on a new cooler?

The outside of the card is clean and the inside I will blow out with compressed air when I go to install the new cooler.

I'm also buying the cooler because I don't want a card that I have to ramp the fan up to 85% to stay at safe temps.

That Artic Cooler GPU cooler is that a two or three slot cooler? Just wondering if I have to move my sound card further down.