Watercooling = lower ambient temps?

Ephraim

Ephraim

Ephraim

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18 Jan 2006
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209
I'm currently having a problem with the temps on my Gigabyte Windforce 7970Ghz ed. card. I've got everything cooled by air, but the temps on my card are running high and thus needing high fan speeds and causing an almighty racket. This is leading to the missus complaining every time I want to game.

So... I'm looking at options. If I could I'd just spec up a full water cooling loop and put both CPU and GPU under water to try and reduce noise, but I understand that the gigabyte card has no block available for it. So, what I'm wondering is, if I install a loop for the CPU, will that reduce internal temps in the case, and allow the GPU to run cooler? It would make sense to me that this would be the case, but in the real world does it work that way?

Any advice, or alternative suggestions are welcome.
 
Memory heatsinks for the vram, any will do as they are all more or less the same and they barely get warm anyway. The vrm's are the problem as they can need some serious cooling, especially if being overclocked. I have run a core only block on just about all my cards and I usually end up making/modifying a heatsink to cool the vrms. The one I have on my current card is a cut to fit Titan 1U full copper heatsink that I got off the bay for a fiver. It works a treat in combination with my 200mm side panel fan turning at a silent 480rpm and I have not had temps passing 60 degrees even when we had that hot spell.
 
I don't think you need to watercool. The windforce is a very good cooler. I had the 7970, it never got loud at all and kept temps 70 or below under full load. What kind of temps are you getting and are you overclocked?

There are two much easier and more cost effective things you can do improve noise.

Firstly get speedfan or afterburner and check what kind of temps the card is getting to, if it's not too hot then you can adjust the fan curves and use less fan speed to cool, I had mine on 25% at idle which was silent and a Max of 40% when gaming. Temps stayed at around 70.

Increase the airflow in your case with some more fans or tidying up. New air is important!

Also be aware that if you have two monitors or a monitor and TV plugged in at the same time your temps could increase by up to 10 degrees even at idle.

Finally the most cost effective and easiest thing to do if you're overclocked is to drop the clock.
 
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Yea, I just edited that in, I had problems with afterburner not setting the fan curve on boot though so it slipped my mind.
 
Temps are hitting 90 when gaming, that's with the fan autocontrolling and spinning up to 100% I'm not overclocking at all. That was checked during the hot spell.

I've got 5 large case fans, 3 intakes and 2 exhausts. The cable routing is pretty tidy, and I thought that airflow was ok.

The windforce cooler is ok noise wise at about 50% fan, but much more than that and it starts to get annoying (with the chimney on the case open).
 
Perhaps I should have a play with the fans and change some from exhaust to intake, etc, and see if that helps. A part of me fancied a water loop, as I like tinkering, but I guess it's probably better to save my money for now. P'raps when I come to changing the GPU I'll look for something with an appropriate block. Not likely to be for a couple more years tho.

Thanks for the thoughts, chaps
 
Sounds a bit more like there is something wrong with the card, even with half decent airflow I would have thought 90 with a WF cooler was impossible.

Even before I defined fan curves my 7970 never went above about 50% fan speed and never went above 70 and was mostly about 60.

Maybe post a pic of your case setup with fan direction so we can check you haven't got any issues. As someone else said above it might be worth applying new TIM which shouldn't be too difficult to do.
 
robj20 said:
You always have the option of a chip only gpu block.
Click to expand...

+1

I have two 660Ti's on GPU chip block with memory and vrm heatsinks and they run well and are fairly highly overclocked. Probably not as good as a full cover block but certainly better than even high end air cooling. Max temp my GPUs reach under furmark is 54 degrees.

Next graphics card/s will have full cover block though, but that's more for the looks and simplicity to be honest.

E-I
 
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I shall get some pics up a bit later.

I'm not sure on the idea of 2 closed loops, as I understand that CL coolers are noisy than air.
 
I ran a game to get some indicative temps now that the heat wave is over and Afterburner told me that it was maxxing out at 80 degrees.

So I opened the machine up to take some pictures and realised that the main exhaust fan at the back wasn't running. A bit more investigation suggests that the fan controller for both exhaust fans is broken, and so I had no air being pulled from the case, just air being pushed in. Bypassed the controller and plugged them into the mainboard and ran a game for an hour or so. 64 degrees maximum with the fan curve limiting speed to 40% or less. I cannot express how much better the whole thing is.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
 
Ephraim said:
I ran a game to get some indicative temps now that the heat wave is over and Afterburner told me that it was maxxing out at 80 degrees.

So I opened the machine up to take some pictures and realised that the main exhaust fan at the back wasn't running. A bit more investigation suggests that the fan controller for both exhaust fans is broken, and so I had no air being pulled from the case, just air being pushed in.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Click to expand...

Well that explains a lot then :-)

Don't throw away the watercooling idea long term though. I thoroughly enjoyed putting mine together and will probably always water cool my main rig from now on. Just be aware it isn't always cheap, , but I've ended up with a 990x overclocked to 4.6Ghz (from stock 3.46) with a pair of 660Ti also reasonably highly overclocked (with only gpu block and memory/ vrm heatsinks) all running via a 480 and a 120mm Rad that even under heavy gaming load is pretty much silent.

Even under burn in load using furmark on both GPUs and prime95 to max out whatever CPU Furmark isn't using (I usually run either 9 or 10 threads so CPU is pretty much 100% but it doesn't slow down furmark). The max temp my CPU reaches is 60 and the highest the gpu's reach is 54. And that only works out at about 10v running through to the noiseblocker pl2 fans (fan curve controlled by Aquero 5). It's still barely audible!

Doubt your missus could complain then :-)

Well, until she see's the credit card bill of course ;-)

E-I
 
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