Cooling middle cards in triple / quad card miners

[tomkandy]

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[Jack of Diamonds]

As a quickfix I'd install IC Diamond 7 on all graphics cores, or Arctic Silver 5. Should drop temps by 5-10c compared to the stock random toothpaste they put on the chip in the factory.

[Uzza]

Try to use an extra fan to help move air away from it.

As a quickfix I'd install IC Diamond 7 on all graphics cores, or Arctic Silver 5. Should drop temps by 5-10c compared to the stock random toothpaste they put on the chip in the factory.

That only helps if the air can be moved away, otherwise the temperature will still build up.

[unixdude]

I'm having a bastard of a time cooling the center card in my 3 x 5870 rig. At stock clocks it's going up to 90C and then throttling back, and eventually crashing out. I've got an 80mm fan cable tied to the cards and pulling air out, got some 120mm 75CFM ones on the way. Any bright ideas? It's in a caseless chassis, in a 16C server room FWIW.

Got an very similar setup with 4x 5870's in one rig and 3 x 5870's in another which are both using test bench cases in a server room at 18C. My temps would hit 89 to 92 degress ( 92 this is when the throttling kicks in from what i have seen) so to remedy this I needed the cold air in the server room to circulate around the cards simple fix was to buy two a cheap desk fans and put them next to the cases pointing directly at the cards blowing air across them. This dropped my temps from 89/92 to 77/74 degrees centigrade thats with the cores at 900 and ram at 900. 

[zapeta]

I ended up pointing a box fan at my case as well. 

You can also try carefully placing a couple caps off of a 2 liter soda bottle between the cards as spacer of sorts.  There is usually enough flexibility that you can open up that additional airspace, especially if the cards aren't screwed to the case very tightly.

[Uzza]

This dropped my temps from 89/92 to 77/74 degrees centigrade thats with the cores at 900 and ram at 900.  

You should underclock the memory. My 4870 went down 10 degrees by lowering from 900 to 190.
And if you hit the sweet spot, you'll gain a few MH/s. For me it's at 190, for 5xxx I've read 1/3 of core.

[tunatime]

get a good 120mmX38mm think  fan they move a lot of air and have higher static air pressure take the fan and make a duct to  the card fan intake and that should lower you temps a good bit

this is a good fan to use http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835705002 or if you don't care about noise http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835706022  WARRING this will be loudest thing in your house but you take the fan make your duct bring it to the face of you card an then fit the duct to the card so that  no air goes around the card or if you want to hafe ass it take fan ues duct tape and tape it to the card then use  tape to make a funnel so all the air goes in between the cards not over around them

[Meatball]

If you're running with an open case I've found that just putting one of these little $16 fans behind your cards and letting it blow through all the cards worked wonders.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Honeywell-Turbo-Force-Air-Circulator-Fan/16503230

[rethaw]

This dropped my temps from 89/92 to 77/74 degrees centigrade thats with the cores at 900 and ram at 900. 

You should underclock the memory. My 4870 went down 10 degrees by lowering from 900 to 190.
And if you hit the sweet spot, you'll gain a few MH/s. For me it's at 190, for 5xxx I've read 1/3 of core.

^ This is the way to go. Also, depending on your card you can move air away from the GPU by placing a fan to pull air out of the side of the case. If you were to place a fan at the base of the card blowing through to the outside of the case and another to suck external to the case would work well. Underclock first though, as adding fans just increases power consumption.

[Wepp]

https://i.imgur.com/Jd8aO.jpg

[bcpokey]

 

Thanks for the laugh. I love the ghetto rigging of home brews. Good stuff.

Anyway, just wanted to mention pulling hot air "off" the cards is much less useful than pushing cool air "on" to the cards (specifically the fan area). They already have fans to blow hot air out, the problem is they get squeezed for getting cooler air in. Push a little piece of plastic to space the cards out a little bit, then strap on a nice 120mm (preferablly one with high static pressure not high CFM) to the front or side and push in some cool refreshing air;.

[kirby9058]

I've got a nice case with a big mesh front end. My solution was cramming as many case fans in there as I could. I've got an intake in front, pulling cool air directly onto the cards. Got a 120mm exhaust on the back, and another on the side panel directly above the cards, and a 70mm intake on the same panel. It seems to be working pretty well. Noisy as hell, but effective.

[Uzza]

This gets me on to problem #2 - I can't get any of the overclocking tools - AMD GPU tool, MSI afterburner, ATItool to work with my current crossfire config. I should have resistors turning up for dummy plugs tommorow, hopefully that will resolve that.

Removing the crossfire bridge and using dummy plugs would be better, as then you can clock them individually using for example MSI Afterburner. That's how I plan to run my dual 5870 setup.

[donotdisassemble]

This gets me on to problem #2 - I can't get any of the overclocking tools - AMD GPU tool, MSI afterburner, ATItool to work with my current crossfire config. I should have resistors turning up for dummy plugs tommorow, hopefully that will resolve that.

#1: remove the crossfire cable. 

#2: I had mediocre luck (like tuning one card, not the other, etc.. ) with everything but ATI tools.  Make sure you disable or uninstall all the others first (Including disabling ATI windows services) then reboot, disable UAC, and install ATI Tools as Administrator... this is assuming you have win 7.  Also if you have issues make sure to up the card voltage before messing too much with the RAM or clock speed on the card (someone else on this board helped me with that).  Once you do ALL that you should be golden.

[xaxistech]

Try watercooling, probobly around 600 to cool those 4 cards