HEAT - 7800 GTX w/ SLI

I have two 7800 GTX graphic cards running in SLI mode. Plus I have two
harddrives, and it's all powered by a 600w powersupply. Add all this
up and I have serious heat issues. The upper graphic card idles at
about 65c and goes up to 105c under extreme load. The lower card is
usually 10c cooler, but still too hot.

I want to replace my case fans with ones that have double RPM/power of
the ones I have on here now, yet they must be nearly silent. I also
want to replace the horrible fans on the graphic cards with one of
those gpu fan kits.

Any suggestions? Can anyone tell me what the "top rated" & "top of the
line" GPU and case cooling fans are?




ps - I wouldn't recommend Asus 7800 GTX cards in SLI to my worst
enemy. It's way too noisy and hot. Avoid.

"Dennis" wrote in message
oups.com...
I have two 7800 GTX graphic cards running in SLI mode. Plus I have two
harddrives, and it's all powered by a 600w powersupply. Add all this
up and I have serious heat issues. The upper graphic card idles at
about 65c and goes up to 105c under extreme load. The lower card is
usually 10c cooler, but still too hot.

Saw the same issue with my two X1900XTs in Crossfire. The card mounted at
the top has a restricted air intake and ends up recycling heated air.

I want to replace my case fans with ones that have double RPM/power of
the ones I have on here now, yet they must be nearly silent. I also
want to replace the horrible fans on the graphic cards with one of
those gpu fan kits.

You need a case fan in the case's expansion card area (or at least a big
vent in the side panel). Bigger/faster case fans at your case's existing
locations wouldn't do squat. What is the make and model of your case.

Any suggestions? Can anyone tell me what the "top rated" & "top of the
line" GPU and case cooling fans are?

http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?disc=1&idx=40

ps - I wouldn't recommend Asus 7800 GTX cards in SLI to my worst
enemy. It's way too noisy and hot. Avoid.

Hence nVidia's 7900 series, basically the 7800 with a die shrink to reduce
heat. There is no real reason to get 7800GTX cards nowadays unless they are
at a big discount.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

Dennis wrote:
I have two 7800 GTX graphic cards running in SLI mode. Plus I have two
harddrives, and it's all powered by a 600w powersupply. Add all this
up and I have serious heat issues. The upper graphic card idles at
about 65c and goes up to 105c under extreme load. The lower card is
usually 10c cooler, but still too hot.

I want to replace my case fans with ones that have double RPM/power of
the ones I have on here now, yet they must be nearly silent. I also
want to replace the horrible fans on the graphic cards with one of
those gpu fan kits.

Any suggestions? Can anyone tell me what the "top rated" & "top of the
line" GPU and case cooling fans are?

ps - I wouldn't recommend Asus 7800 GTX cards in SLI to my worst
enemy. It's way too noisy and hot. Avoid.

The ArcticCooling Nvidia 5 Rev.3 is discontinued, and that would have
been one option. One of those makes your card a double slot card.

This is a similar design.

Thermaltake CL-G0080 Enter VGA Cooler - Retail $32.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835106090

Xbitlabs lists a 7800GTX 512MB as 95W. The theta_R listed here is
0.39C/W. Even if all the heat was the GPU, the temp rise is
95W * 0.39C/W = 37C rise. If the room is 25C, the computer case
is 32C, a 37C rise on top of that is 69C at the GPU. But that is
making a series of pessimistic assumptions. Once two of these are
installed, you have less computer case heating, so your case may
be cooler than my assumption.

http://www.thermaltake.com/product/C...0/cl-g0080.asp

If there is some way to modify the Asus choice of voltage and
frequency, maybe you could make the card dissipate less heat.
That might help as well.

There is a Dell 7800GTX card, that uses the Nvidia reference cooler.
That looks very nice, and probably runs cooler than the Thermaltake
or the old ArcticCooling solution. But I doubt you'll find the
reference cooler available for sale anywhere. Unless there are
a lot of dead Dell cards, out of warranty somewhere.

http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/...=103874,00.jpg

Another option would be to sell the cards and buy something else.

While there are water blocks available for the cards, water is a
lot of extra hassle. And you would want a water solution that
can shut down the computer, in the event of a cooling failure.

Paul

Thanks for the replies guys...

I think I'm going to start by seeing what effect this has on the top
graphic card: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=138

I hope its not incredibly painful to install... and I hope it fits
nicely... things are pretty tight in there already...

Someone said bigger/better case fans in the existing locations wouldnt
help, I'm not sure I agree. All fans are not created equal... are
they? I note that some are 800rpm, some 1200rpm,1900rpm, etc. More
air moving through = good... yes? This case isnt anything special, and
I dont think its possible for me to drill a hole and put in a side
fan, although that'd be nice.... so my options are limited.

Which brand of case fan is "best" and moves the most air?

'Dennis' wrote:
| I think I'm going to start by seeing what effect this has on the top
| graphic card: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=138
|
| I hope its not incredibly painful to install... and I hope it fits
| nicely... things are pretty tight in there already...
|
| Someone said bigger/better case fans in the existing locations wouldnt
| help, I'm not sure I agree. All fans are not created equal... are
| they? I note that some are 800rpm, some 1200rpm,1900rpm, etc. More
| air moving through = good... yes? This case isnt anything special, and
| I dont think its possible for me to drill a hole and put in a side
| fan, although that'd be nice.... so my options are limited.
|
| Which brand of case fan is "best" and moves the most air?
_____

The amount of air moved is almost entirely dependent on the diameter, rpm,
and number of blades/size of blades. Faster fans are nosier. Fans with
ball bearings are louder than fans with sleeve bearings but last longer.
For a fast fan a manual speed control is useful to pick a noise level you
can live with. One 120 mm fan directly over the intakes of the GPU fans
will do wonders

Cutting a hole in the case side panel just over the graphics cards is your
best solution. This isn't too difficult. You can do it in about an hour.

The tools required: a drill, a nibbler, and a half round file (a nibbler
from RadioShack or similar supply house costs about $15 US.

Draw a circle of the correct diameter in the side panel at the location for
the fan.

Drill a 3/8" or larger hole just inside the circle. (The cutting end of the
nibbler will fit into this hole.)

Use the nibbler to cut along the circle (the nibbler will cut out a metal
chip about 1/8' X 3/16" each time you squeeze the handles.) It will take
about 30 minutes to cut completely around the circle.

Smooth the edges with the half-round file.

Drill four holes for the fan mounting screws.

Buy a fan bezel with a filter to mount on the outside of the side panel
(this will keep dust out and give a finished appearance.)

Attach the fan and bezel.

A fan with a manual speed control will have a long power cable, useful when
you attach and remove the side panel.

A $20 US fan and bezel (almost any brand) plus $20 US for the nibbler and
file is the total cost if you have access to a drill and 3/8 ' bit.

Or you could go high end with an EBM Pabst fan. Their 4300 series ( 119
X119 X 32 mm) of 12 VDC tube-axial fans will move from 50 to 116.5 cu.
ft./min. of air with a noise level of 27 dB to 49 dB. These fans are very
powerful, very high quality, and very expensive.

Phil Weldon

"Dennis" wrote in message
oups.com...
| Thanks for the replies guys...
|
| I think I'm going to start by seeing what effect this has on the top
| graphic card: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=138
|
| I hope its not incredibly painful to install... and I hope it fits
| nicely... things are pretty tight in there already...
|
| Someone said bigger/better case fans in the existing locations wouldnt
| help, I'm not sure I agree. All fans are not created equal... are
| they? I note that some are 800rpm, some 1200rpm,1900rpm, etc. More
| air moving through = good... yes? This case isnt anything special, and
| I dont think its possible for me to drill a hole and put in a side
| fan, although that'd be nice.... so my options are limited.
|
| Which brand of case fan is "best" and moves the most air?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|

Dennis wrote:
Thanks for the replies guys...

I think I'm going to start by seeing what effect this has on the top
graphic card: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=138

I hope its not incredibly painful to install... and I hope it fits
nicely... things are pretty tight in there already...

Someone said bigger/better case fans in the existing locations wouldnt
help, I'm not sure I agree. All fans are not created equal... are
they? I note that some are 800rpm, some 1200rpm,1900rpm, etc. More
air moving through = good... yes? This case isnt anything special, and
I dont think its possible for me to drill a hole and put in a side
fan, although that'd be nice.... so my options are limited.

Which brand of case fan is "best" and moves the most air?


They are rated in CFM or cubic feet per minute. That tells you how
good they are at moving air. You don't have to worry about the RPMs
when you have a CFM number to work with. The rating is at zero load
(no resistance to the fan doing its job). If there is grill work over
the exhaust, the fan can do less work. Similarly, if the intake vent
is not large enough, you won't get the full performance either.

This is the fan I've got. It draws one amp of current and may not
be safe to connect to a fan header. I have it hooked to a Molex
1x4 disk drive power cable. The rating of this fan is 110CFM and
I use a voltage reducer to drop the noise level and CFM a bit.
You would not be able to sleep in the room using this fan.

http://www.circuittest.com/English/C...A1212038MS.asp

That fan is 38mm deep, so it is 50% thicker than your average fan.
That is part of the reason it is rated at 110CFM. I had to remove
the plastic bezel on the front of my computer case, to help
airflow to the fan. The fan operates partially under vacuum, and
the fan speeds up if it isn't getting enough air to work with.
When I take the side off the case, with the computer running,
I can still hear that fan "relax" a little.

It helps to have a table of CFM and dBA, so you can relate the cooling
you'll be getting, and the resulting noise. This catalog page on
Digikey, shows the CFM and dBA for some Panaflo fans. The FBL12G12L1A
is a 12V fan, with 52.95CFM and 35dBA. That would be audible, but
just barely. That fan is an "L" or low. The one next to it is 46dBA
and would be definitely audible.

http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/T072/P1999.pdf

Fan noise comes in different forms. Some fans give a "tone", while
others have a more "white noise" quality to it. The dBA cannot do
justice to that characteristic, due to the weighting given to the
sound spectrum. There are enthusiast sites dealing in silent PC cooling,
that rate some of the fan products out there. And one of their
observations in a review I was reading, was how non-reproducible
the sound measurements can be. Apparently, some fans become noisy,
after being tapped on the table just once.

Paul

"Phil Weldon" wrote in message
link.net...
'Dennis' wrote:
| I think I'm going to start by seeing what effect this has on the top
| graphic card: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=138
|
| I hope its not incredibly painful to install... and I hope it fits
| nicely... things are pretty tight in there already...
|
| Someone said bigger/better case fans in the existing locations wouldnt
| help, I'm not sure I agree. All fans are not created equal... are
| they? I note that some are 800rpm, some 1200rpm,1900rpm, etc. More
| air moving through = good... yes? This case isnt anything special, and
| I dont think its possible for me to drill a hole and put in a side
| fan, although that'd be nice.... so my options are limited.
|
| Which brand of case fan is "best" and moves the most air?
_____

The amount of air moved is almost entirely dependent on the diameter, rpm,
and number of blades/size of blades. Faster fans are nosier. Fans with
ball bearings are louder than fans with sleeve bearings but last longer.
For a fast fan a manual speed control is useful to pick a noise level you
can live with. One 120 mm fan directly over the intakes of the GPU fans
will do wonders

Cutting a hole in the case side panel just over the graphics cards is your
best solution. This isn't too difficult. You can do it in about an hour.

The tools required: a drill, a nibbler, and a half round file (a nibbler
from RadioShack or similar supply house costs about $15 US.

Draw a circle of the correct diameter in the side panel at the location
for
the fan.

Drill a 3/8" or larger hole just inside the circle. (The cutting end of
the
nibbler will fit into this hole.)

Use the nibbler to cut along the circle (the nibbler will cut out a metal
chip about 1/8' X 3/16" each time you squeeze the handles.) It will take
about 30 minutes to cut completely around the circle.

Smooth the edges with the half-round file.

Drill four holes for the fan mounting screws.

Buy a fan bezel with a filter to mount on the outside of the side panel
(this will keep dust out and give a finished appearance.)

Attach the fan and bezel.

A fan with a manual speed control will have a long power cable, useful
when
you attach and remove the side panel.

A $20 US fan and bezel (almost any brand) plus $20 US for the nibbler and
file is the total cost if you have access to a drill and 3/8 ' bit.

Or you could go high end with an EBM Pabst fan. Their 4300 series ( 119
X119 X 32 mm) of 12 VDC tube-axial fans will move from 50 to 116.5 cu.
ft./min. of air with a noise level of 27 dB to 49 dB. These fans are very
powerful, very high quality, and very expensive.

Phil Weldon

Actually, if he brings down the case temps he may notice that the video card
fans may run at a slower and quieter speed. The three large (120mm?? I
believe) 3-speed fans that came with installed in my Swiftech case are
labled Antec as it is actually a modded P180 Antec case are extremely quiet
and do a great job. I flipped one exhaust fan around to blow into the case
so I now have two blowing in at low speed and the other (radiator fan)
running at high speed and that is a good balance. I have no experience with
the 7800 series cards and their cooling solutions, but my two 8800 GTX cards
in SLI are very quiet. The loudest thing I hear is the PSU.

Ed

Great posts guys, thanks for all the info.

Ed: My two 7800 GTX cards in SLI are also "very quiet", at least when
you first turn on the computer. But within about 5 minutes the noise
doubles. Once you launch a game the noise triples again. Within 10
min it sounds like it's got half a dozen JET ENGINES inside it. We've
nicknamed this box "The Beast"... You can hear it roar from 50 feet
away..

For now I have a ghetto solution, I've put an external 12" fan about a
foot away forcing air in into the case at massive speeds. This seems
to keep the upper card below 100c. Next week I'll try installing a GPU
arctic cooler. I suspect this brand of 7800 GTX (Asus) is
particularily bad for their stock fans/cooling. Avoid Asus 7800 SLI!

'Ed Medlin' wrote:
| Actually, if he brings down the case temps he may notice that the video
card
| fans may run at a slower and quieter speed. The three large (120mm?? I
| believe) 3-speed fans that came with installed in my Swiftech case are
| labled Antec as it is actually a modded P180 Antec case are extremely
quiet
| and do a great job. I flipped one exhaust fan around to blow into the case
| so I now have two blowing in at low speed and the other (radiator fan)
| running at high speed and that is a good balance. I have no experience
with
| the 7800 series cards and their cooling solutions, but my two 8800 GTX
cards
| in SLI are very quiet. The loudest thing I hear is the PSU.
_____

With my new ThermalTake i1 CPU heatsink/fan on the CPU, the CPU cooling air
path is along the plane of the motherboard, from front to back. My server
case (with nine 5 1/4 inch bays) a 120 mm fan will exactly fit in front of
three bays containing my 500 GByte hard drives and behind the front bay door
louvers. The air flow through this fan goes directly past the drives and
then through the ThermalTake i1 fins, then out the back through two 80 mm
fans behind the CPU. The 120 mm front fan is on a manual front panel
control; I turn the speed down until its noise level is below that of the
other fans. With this arrangement the hard drive internal temperature is 5
C above room ambient air.

I have only one 8800 GTS, but if I were to move to two I'd just add a second
120 mm fan in front of the bottom three drive bays. I also have a 120 mm
fan mounted in the side panel, but the location is based on an earlier
motherboard that did not have two PCI-E X16 slots, so it is too high up to
properly cover two SLI slots. It does, however, do a good job of forcing
air into the nVidia Northbridge chip heatsink/fan and across the back of my
one PCI-E 16X 8800 GTS. It is my feeling that a larger number of slower
fans is preferable, both for lower noise and better air circulation than
fewer, faster fans.

I realize that a 8800 GTS generates a lot less heat than a 8800 GTX, but
over all the most system noise comes from the chipset fan (so far I have it
set to manual, always 100%, as I work to increase the CPU and bus speeds.)
[The 680i chipset reference design has the Northbridge and the Southbridge
heatsinks connected by a heatpipe, with fins only on the Northbridge {to
clear any PCI-E 16X card in the first 16X slot]; some 680i motherboards come
with a fan to be installed on the Northbridge.

More information is available at alt.comp.hardware.overclocking .

Phil Weldon


"Ed Medlin" wrote in message
t...
|
| "Phil Weldon" wrote in message
| link.net...
| 'Dennis' wrote:
| | I think I'm going to start by seeing what effect this has on the top
| | graphic card: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=138
| |
| | I hope its not incredibly painful to install... and I hope it fits
| | nicely... things are pretty tight in there already...
| |
| | Someone said bigger/better case fans in the existing locations wouldnt
| | help, I'm not sure I agree. All fans are not created equal... are
| | they? I note that some are 800rpm, some 1200rpm,1900rpm, etc. More
| | air moving through = good... yes? This case isnt anything special, and
| | I dont think its possible for me to drill a hole and put in a side
| | fan, although that'd be nice.... so my options are limited.
| |
| | Which brand of case fan is "best" and moves the most air?
| _____
|
| The amount of air moved is almost entirely dependent on the diameter,
rpm,
| and number of blades/size of blades. Faster fans are nosier. Fans with
| ball bearings are louder than fans with sleeve bearings but last longer.
| For a fast fan a manual speed control is useful to pick a noise level
you
| can live with. One 120 mm fan directly over the intakes of the GPU fans
| will do wonders
|
| Cutting a hole in the case side panel just over the graphics cards is
your
| best solution. This isn't too difficult. You can do it in about an
hour.
|
| The tools required: a drill, a nibbler, and a half round file (a
nibbler
| from RadioShack or similar supply house costs about $15 US.
|
| Draw a circle of the correct diameter in the side panel at the location
| for
| the fan.
|
| Drill a 3/8" or larger hole just inside the circle. (The cutting end of
| the
| nibbler will fit into this hole.)
|
| Use the nibbler to cut along the circle (the nibbler will cut out a
metal
| chip about 1/8' X 3/16" each time you squeeze the handles.) It will
take
| about 30 minutes to cut completely around the circle.
|
| Smooth the edges with the half-round file.
|
| Drill four holes for the fan mounting screws.
|
| Buy a fan bezel with a filter to mount on the outside of the side panel
| (this will keep dust out and give a finished appearance.)
|
| Attach the fan and bezel.
|
| A fan with a manual speed control will have a long power cable, useful
| when
| you attach and remove the side panel.
|
| A $20 US fan and bezel (almost any brand) plus $20 US for the nibbler
and
| file is the total cost if you have access to a drill and 3/8 ' bit.
|
| Or you could go high end with an EBM Pabst fan. Their 4300 series ( 119
| X119 X 32 mm) of 12 VDC tube-axial fans will move from 50 to 116.5 cu.
| ft./min. of air with a noise level of 27 dB to 49 dB. These fans are
very
| powerful, very high quality, and very expensive.
|
| Phil Weldon
|
| Actually, if he brings down the case temps he may notice that the video
card
| fans may run at a slower and quieter speed. The three large (120mm?? I
| believe) 3-speed fans that came with installed in my Swiftech case are
| labled Antec as it is actually a modded P180 Antec case are extremely
quiet
| and do a great job. I flipped one exhaust fan around to blow into the case
| so I now have two blowing in at low speed and the other (radiator fan)
| running at high speed and that is a good balance. I have no experience
with
| the 7800 series cards and their cooling solutions, but my two 8800 GTX
cards
| in SLI are very quiet. The loudest thing I hear is the PSU.
|
| Ed
|
|