6950 Crossfire: new to Xfire have some questions.

[Larnz]

Hi All,

I have just picked up 2 x 6950's and they seem to be running ok but my concern is temp related as my 2 saphire cards are basically touching and whomping out some serious heat from the feel of it esp the top card that has its fan totally block by said second card.

How do you tell the gpu temp of both cards? In CCC it only displays 1 temp? is this an avg of the two or ?

Also how hot is 2 hot or should they just be happy as they are designed to be so close to each other?

Should I set the fan speed in CCC to a set % rather than auto, if so what would be the best suggestion ?

Apologies if these are silly questions i just don't wanna fry my new purchases

Thanks
Larnz

 

[adairusmc]

I am not sure how the new layout of the catalyst 10.12's has it, but when I ran my tri-fire 4870 setup there was a drop down menu to select the GPU to display the temperature for.

Looking at the Guru3d 6950 crossfire review, they were seeing idle temps around 41C and a load temp of 89C on their setup. That is in line with other things I have read as well.

As far as setting the fan speed, try to find a fixed speed that isnt too loud for you but that gives you the best temps. I think with my tri-fire 4870 setup I was fixing the speeds at like 40% and I never had to worry about temps so much, but with these it will be different.

 

[Larnz]

In 3d mark 11 it hits 94C as the hottest I have seen. It is currently 33C here today so thats probably not helping much

What are danger temps for cards?

 

[Elfear]

If you have three PCI-E slots on your motherboard, you might think about moving one card to the outer slot. Even if the outer slot is only x8, it will not hinder performance. Hardocp did a really nice write-up about Crossfire/SLI performance using x8 and x16 slots. Difference was nil with mixed x8/x16 and down 7% with x8/x8 but only at super high Eyefinity type resolutions.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Have you set your fan speed to manual and created a gaming profile to run it faster in gaming (3d) mode?