SLI cooling?

[ebeattie]

Sorry, needed to practice my ebonics in the summary but yeah, I think my SLI 7900GTOs are getting abit hot. I have a Thermatake Soprano case and a DFI Lan Party mobo. I was plaing NFS:U2 (hehe, only racing game I have ATM) and maxed out all the settings, runs beautiful!

Except for the part where it locks up. I stress tested my rig after I did the mobo swap and she ran fine under full stress for 8 hours. I am going to eliminate my RAM, CPU and MOBO from my troubleshooting based on that.

I was running the cards at a slight overclock (682 core, 690 RAM) so I believe its possible that the extra heat from the overclock cause instability. I have since gone back to stock settings.

Any of you care to take a stab?

Also, since the GTO is a dual slot solution, and SLI makes them run right next to each other, is there anything else I can do aside from running an extra fan next to both cards to help with heat dissipation?

 

[lopri]

Your video cards' RAM might be overheating. Another possibility is your system RAM is not up to 3D tasks. Have you tried running each card separately? If you're going to put an extra fan, I'd suggest to have it blow down towards the middle of both cards from the side.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Maybe swapping those heatsinks for a better heatsink. e.g nvsilencer 5 which blows air out of the case.

Theres not much you could do since those stock heatsinks are pretty damn good.

 

[Zebo]

DFI board runs real hot. how about some temps? Cards? Mobo? CPU?

How about not OCing and looping 3dmarks? Howz that turn out?

Lots of talking not much info you gave.

 

[nitromullet]

Theres not much you could do since those stock heatsinks are pretty damn good.

He's right, but they do need fresh air to help with cooling. I have a 120mm intake fan blowing air on mine, and it dropped the temps about 10C overall. This mainly helped because I have my X-Fi right next to the bottom card, as there were no other PCI slots available except for the one between the two cards.

 

[Ayah]

Lots of fresh air helps those cards.

 

[ebeattie]

I have some extra Stealths lying around, Ill figure out how to set them up in my case. I just installed nTune. Ill pay around with it for a bit.