Air cooling trifire 7950's

N

NukeULater

Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2006
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Since the bottom has dropped out of the bitcoin market and the value of used ati video cards have plummeted I decided to pick up a few extra cards for some experimentation. I threw in a third card into my main rig and have been enjoying the extra performance of trifire. The problem that I am having is the temperature that these cards are reaching while under load. During a full screen furmark stress test they are hitting 95C which makes me very uncomfortable. In an attempt to cool them down I installed two fans that draw directly from the front of my 900D to cool them, yet they had almost no effect.

How are people running these tri or quad video card setups while keeping the cards cool? Should I remove the plastic shrouds and place a standard 120mm or 140mm fan directly in front to push the hot air out of the pci slots?

The cards I'm rockin' are these Sapphire 7950 3GB. The rest of the system specs are in my sig.

Here is a photo of my setup. I have the two fans installed on the hard drive cages directly in front of the pcie slots.

 
I ran 3 7970s in Tri fire for over a year and they were always in the 90 degrees Celsius range. At first I was worried but they can run that hot. I tried everything but they just ran hot. I remember I had to enable Vsync on Witcher2 to keep the gpu usage down and run it a little cooler or the game would lock.
 
I have 3x MSI HD 7950 OC BE, custom fan profile with OB which keeps them under 70c plus with a side intake fan blowing right on them.
 
Hmm, 900D seems to be oriented for water cooling mostly. I couldn't find a side panel with a fan on it as that would be something that would greatly improve temperatures. Maybe try placing one fan directly on the back of the 3 cards with zip ties? I don't think removing the plastic shrouds would really help though.

You may have to get creative to work this out. Wicked setup though & hope to see how you lower temps.
 
runudownquick said:
Hmm, 900D seems to be oriented for water cooling mostly. I couldn't find a side panel with a fan on it as that would be something that would greatly improve temperatures. Maybe try placing one fan directly on the back of the 3 cards with zip ties? I don't think removing the plastic shrouds would really help though.

You may have to get creative to work this out. Wicked setup though & hope to see how you lower temps.
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The 900D is more of a water cooling case, but it's certainly no slouch when it comes to air cooling though. I have tried mounting a fan directly on the back and sides of the cards with no major effect. I think the cards are just to tight together to get any decent airflow.

Yeah, it's a nice system. Certainly a huge step up from my old Q9450.

Ozymandias said:
Furmark, pah. What are you load temperatures like during gaming?
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While playing Skyrim they are hitting 85C. That's at 2560x1600 with all the eye candy turned on.
 
I've had the same problem with the dual-x design cards as they leave little to no room between cards. There's really no way around it other than watercooling or reference style cards where the heat goes out the back of the case. Then again I ran it in a 650D where airflow isn't the best but even with a side panel with 4 scythe GT fans, I found little improvement in temps.
 
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