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What was the worst graphics card for heat?

Caporegime
Joined
1 Dec 2010
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Welling, London
I haven’t had that many compared to many of you, but what is generally accepted as the worlds hottest ever graphics card? I know the 480 was legendary hot, but did any others beat it?

What cards roasted you alive when really pushing?
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Dec 2003
Posts
25,666
GTX480 was pretty bad but I also remember having a 4870X2(?) that ran hot, I hated it more for the fan constantly changing speed though.

I remember with the 9800XT people were complaining about those running hot and ATI's response was that they were okay up to 105C, that was more down to small cooler than TDP though.
 
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Associate
Joined
22 Dec 2011
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2,034
Location
UK
I haven’t had that many compared to many of you, but what is generally accepted as the worlds hottest ever graphics card? I know the 480 was legendary hot, but did any others beat it?

What cards roasted you alive when really pushing?

well my 5700xt has been hitting 103c during the last two days.
 
Soldato
Joined
31 Dec 2007
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13,616
Location
The TARDIS, Wakefield, UK
well my 5700xt has been hitting 103c during the last two days.

thats probably down to poor airflow in your case not the card being hot - mine tops out at 76c

GTX 480 was the most notorious.

R9 290/390 (same card rebadged) was hot but not as bad as the 480.


295x2 did run hot but thats because there were two GPU's so it was kind of forgiven and did have a AIO cooler.
 
Soldato
Joined
10 Oct 2012
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4,415
Location
Denmark
Out of the cards I’ve had, I’d say the hottest is definitely a Vega 64 I recently had. Card was a good performer, but it was so hot under load.
def the vega needs water to do well .. tho the r9 290 came very close

My air-cooled Vega 64 got some beef with you 2 :p. She purrs along at stock speeds at around 70c using a stock fan curve(it's very hot and humid here at the moment). That's not to bad.

I would say the hottest card I've had would have been the 4870x2 and the R9 290, Hawaii was HOOOT. Other GPU's that springs to mind would be the GTX 480 inferno edition.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
There are different ways to look at this - a card could pull 100s of watts and it is going to push out a lot of heat but if it has effective cooling and somewhere for that heat to go the card itself could well run cool. On the other hand a card with a much lower power consumption but sub-par cooling might run much higher temperatures as measured by software.

God I hated some of the FX series cards

The FX series was largely pretty hateful - in terms of performance only the late 59xx models were really anything worth talking about and that usually only came from overclocking them and while by the time it was exposed by newer software fairly late in the day they were lacking in colour precision in some functions and processing some features of new APIs at reduced resolution to make up for hardware inadequacy.

If I hadn't got my hands on one of those special edition Gainward 5900XT that used higher spec detuned VRAM that could be overclocked by 50% and got a 50% core overclock with a replacement heatsink those would have been very dark days.

Repurposed an old Intel heatsink but amazingly it both fitted perfectly and also worked - allowing me a much higher overclock than the stock cooling:

KSVO3K4.png

EDIT: LOL forgot I did this - got my hands on a 5950 Ultra BIOS and customised it to work on the 5900XT to get better memory timings and a few other performance tweaks and I thought I was so cool:

Mgwlpvs.png
 
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gEd

gEd

Associate
Joined
25 Jan 2003
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532
Location
South London
Geforce 6600GT. They weren't overly power hungry but the coolers were awful. They ran anywhere up to 140C.

I had a passive one (who thought that was a good idea?) and IIRC it got so hot that some of the solder melted and a component fell out !
Worst card I ever bought in nearly 20 years
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Geforce 6600GT. They weren't overly power hungry but the coolers were awful. They ran anywhere up to 140C.

That reminds me of my Gainward Bliss 6800 ultra extreme core bridged to AGP - another card that would overclock like crazy IIRC I saw it, at least according to the software monitoring, hit 125C under load but it was always stable (possible the sensor wasn't accurate).

I miss the days when Gainward made some actual special cards that were heavily customised from stock cards.
 
Caporegime
Joined
21 Jun 2006
Posts
38,372
All the cards I owned the gtx 1080 blower. So much so I replaced with a non blower card.

All the cards I personally seen in friends rigs then 295*2. Now that thing is stuff of legend. My mate sold it for funny money several years after buying it during the mining craze. It paid for his 1080ti almost.

It's crazy how he managed to run that card and it cost him nothing after so long apart from electricity.

The person that bought it must have been a hardcore miner as I wouldn't touch an out of warranty card and not for the money we are talking about either but it's a common theme these days. You can buy brand new for cheaper or just a little more than some peoples asking and they sell quickly too which is crazy.
 
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