Air cooling the GTX 480

[jbh545]

I've discovered that cooling on these cards is actually *excellent*. The thing is that unlike other cards, the exposed heatpipe design is really helped by your case airflow, allowing you you add a massive amount of cooling without going to water. Basically it's a double edged sword. These cards will cook your case with no airflow, but "normal" cards can't have their cooling augmented much just with casefans.

I never bought fans for my ABS black pearl (rebadged lian li) because past videocards just dumped heat out the back and my i7 920 wasn't that hot at 4 ghz. Just the rear exhaust fan and cpu fan were plenty since the side is mesh. So as I said in my other thread, my 480 SLI was idling 63/68 which is not good. Overclocked to 820 core the hotter card was 94c at 100% fan after a runthrough of the train level on Crysis warhead.

With $40 worth of new fans, I now idle at 46 for both cards with all fans silent (and this is without a TIM replacement, which I still plan to do.) The load temps have similarly decreased a good 20c or so. Now the hotter card only goes to 82c at 82% fan (so it would be in the mid 70s if I ran it at 100%.)

I arranged the fans like this.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/3051/casem.jpg
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/8981/caseu.jpg

Note that the cards are upside down. The added fans are 2x 120mm Yate Loon on the top acting as intake above the card fan and exhaust above the heatsink. There are 2x 140mm Yate loon stacked on top of each other and affixed to the case with velcro, with the top one blowing right into the card intakes. Lastly, I velcroed a 90mm gentle typhoon on top of the cpu heatsink, blowing up onto the gpu heatpipes.

*****The most important fans by far are the ones creating the vertical column of air flowing upward across the heatpipes.***** If you don't have something fulfilling that function already, get it. Even a POS 80mm fan from an old case sitting on top of the CPU heatsink helped a lot while I was waiting for my fan order. I recommend the Gentle Typhoon since from my research it it will last longer in horizontal orientation than Scythe fans.

It looks like I've definitely got some room to volt these cards now since I don't care about noise. I wouldn't be surprised to get 900 core while keeping them in the 80s. Pretty good for a card that wasn't supposed to overclock well.

Now to clean these wires up....

 

[thilanliyan]

^High leakage chips overclock well if you can keep the heat under control don't they? Not sure if leakage is the actual problem with Fermi though.

 

[MarcVenice]

So the cooling is so great, you needed an additional three fans to stop it from overheating?

I must say though, in a pretty regular case, like a HAF 932, two GTX 480's didn't really become to hot (not according to spec anyway). Most people running two GTX 480's should have decent airflow anyways.

 

[jbh545]

So the cooling is so great, you needed an additional three fans to stop it from overheating?

So far it's looking like I'll settle on a 25-30% overclock with a bit of extra voltage added. That's very good for a multicard setup on air. I've had plenty of cards that could not even manage a 10% overclock on stock volts and didn't improve much with extra voltage.

 

[OCGuy]

nV did a great job of making sure this chip is disbursing the heat well. The cooler is excellent, but that is because it has to be.

The fan is actually SMALLER than the GTX280 fan, which is why it has to ramp up more to push the same amount of air.

 

[Madcatatlas]

maybe nVidia has a future in GPU coolers?

 

[yh125d]

I have the same case, I have two 120mm yatesas intake on the top, blowing down on my 4890 with an accelero S1 on it, and another 2 92mm fans, so 4 fans for my 4890. A bit overkill, but it works

 

[SHAQ]

I am trying to cool my 470's now. I just put in a bottom 140 intake, a 120 behind the hard drive cage and looped a 90 around my CPU heatsink. Idle doesn't seem much improved. I'll run some games/benchmarks and see how it does. Unfortunately the heat pipes are trapped in the shroud and not much air gets up to the top I bet. It's a shame they couldn't overengineer the cooling.

 

[tweakboy]

To use a Fermi you comp has to run like a jet, oh boy.. Ill pass until possibly GTX580 dual gpu,, and what not.. thx..

 

[Keysplayr]

To use a Fermi you comp has to run like a jet, oh boy.. Ill pass until possibly GTX580 dual gpu,, and what not.. thx..

Absorb what the thread is really about. Really try.

 

[Schmide]

I would say you want to avoid air circles like the in/out fans (arrows) at the top of your case. Although you have a upside down case style, you still want to follow the in through the front/side/bottom out through the back/top/back side. Only exchange your bottom and top.

The whole idea is to keep pressurized air flow and avoid vortexes which can lead to dead air/recycled air spots.

 

[Attic]

I would be hesitant to call the cooling excellent given the heat and noise characteristics of the cards from numerous review sites.

Adding 40 dollars of fans would be an apples/oarnges comparisons of the cooling of your setup to what the cards ship with. Glad your solution is working though.

 

[EarthwormJim]

I would be hesitant to call the cooling excellent given the heat and noise characteristics of the cards from numerous review sites.

Adding 40 dollars of fans would be an apples/oarnges comparisons of the cooling of your setup to what the cards ship with. Glad your solution is working though.

For the amount of heat it has to deal with (250watts at load if not more) and for the space it's limited to, it is quite excellent.

Aftermarket cooling solutions don't have to conform to the same space dimensions that stock cooling solutions must. You can't have heatsinks taller than the card, and you're really limited to occupying two slots at most.

jbh545 can you re-upload your picture? The link doesn't work for me.

 

[Attic]

For the amount of heat it has to deal with (250watts at load if not more) and for the space it's limited to, it is quite excellent.

Well the OP is saying the cooling is excellent IF/WHEN you add extra cooling to it. I can't see pic either btw, relink?

Yes if we consider the large amount of heat the cooler needs to dissapate properly, 300watts at load as seen from more than a few tests, then the cooler is impressive in that regard.

However, the impressive performance relative to the high heat output of the 480 comes at the cost of high temps and/or high noise levels. This is cleary seen from the OP's desire/solution to spend an additional 40 dollars on cooling his cards to what he feels is a comfortable/acceptable level. I'd claim an excellent cooling solution, would not need the extra consideration the 480 needs for keeping it cool at comfortable noise levels.

Edit: Pics workin for me now.

 

[jbh545]

I would say you want to avoid air circles like the in/out fans (arrows) at the top of your case. Although you have a upside down case style, you still want to follow the in through the front/side/bottom out through the back/top/back side. Only exchange your bottom and top.

The whole idea is to keep pressurized air flow and avoid vortexes which can lead to dead air/recycled air spots.

Yeah I know this is the conventional wisdom but the setup seems to work best this way. I felt around in the case for what you're talking about while I was setting it up. If I were to flip that top intake fan, it's just going to be exhausting room temperature air and lowering the pressure on the video card fans. There's actually not much air being mixed because the intake air is just being sucked right into the cards and the exhaust fan is half-blocked by the soundcard. The half that isn't blocked catches the air from the heatsink fan right as it shoots up past the heatpipes.

 

[jbh545]

Well the OP is saying the cooling is excellent IF/WHEN you add extra cooling to it. I can't see pic either btw, relink?

Yes if we consider the large amount of heat the cooler needs to dissapate properly, 300watts at load as seen from more than a few tests, then the cooler is impressive in that regard.

However, the impressive performance relative to the high heat output of the 480 comes at the cost of high temps and/or high noise levels. This is cleary seen from the OP's desire/solution to spend an additional 40 dollars on cooling his cards to what he feels is a comfortable/acceptable level. I'd claim an excellent cooling solution, would not need the extra consideration the 480 needs for keeping it cool at comfortable noise levels.

Edit: Pics workin for me now.

Any time you want to put a large overclock on the card it's going to take some extra cooling. The difference here that is instead of spending a lot on custom HSF, you can spend a small amount on case fans. I didn't just buy these fans for the cards, I had always planned to add on to this case but I didn't feel like spending the extra money. What I did here is probably overkill but I didn't feel like the possibility of ordering more fans later and paying more shipping. Like I said before, the truly critical thing is to get a vertical column of air moving past the heatpipes and exhausting out the top...you can do that with $8 worth of fans (2 yate loons). I decided to spend a bit extra and get the gentle typhoon for one of them since it's the most important fan in the case tho. The 2 140mm fans and the top intake help some but aren't critical.

 

[Schmide]

If I were to flip that top intake fan, it's just going to be exhausting room temperature air and lowering the pressure on the video card fans.

I was saying, since your case is basically upside down, both top fans should blow inward creating positive pressure on the video cards.

 

[EarthwormJim]

You should have both fans blowing downward. The way they are set up, one fan is stealing some of the fresh air from the other. You don't want a vortex at the top like that.


Your Yates may only last a year or so positioned like that. Sleeve bearing fans do not like to be positioned horizontally.