MSI 290 CF -> EVGA 780 SLI

BaDBoY_uK · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:08

I am seriously considering moving from the MSI 290s to the EVGA 780s. The only reason is due to the temps in my case.

I cannot afford water right now but plan to do it next month. But the top card reaches 90degC after 10 mins due to the Carbide and my current Eisberg watercooler setup.

Is it worth it? Or should I hold off until I can get them under water? It seems the XPSC 780 blocks are cheaper too

I would go for blower style fans for now, rather than the ACX versions

But I'd pay an extra 200-300 on top now to change (after selling these) and buying new.

Madness?

shankly1985 · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:24

BaDBoY_uK said:
I am seriously considering moving from the MSI 290s to the EVGA 780s. The only reason is due to the temps in my case.

I cannot afford water right now but plan to do it next month. But the top card reaches 90degC after 10 mins due to the Carbide and my current Eisberg watercooler setup.

Is it worth it? Or should I hold off until I can get them under water? It seems the XPSC 780 blocks are cheaper too

I would go for blower style fans for now, rather than the ACX versions

But I'd pay an extra 200-300 on top now to change (after selling these) and buying new.

Madness?

I feel your pain on the Temps I had to do a complete Motherboard change to get my temps under control.
TBH any GPU's the blow hot air into the case you be in the same situation.

What I did was got a Motherboard that does Dual 16x or Quad 8x or how I have it 16x - - 8x Your Board will let you do 16x - 4x but performance might not be good enough.
Like this - Now my temps never pass 70c

After a bench as you can see they now sit very close to each other.

Edit
if you will be spending £300 then I would look at changing your Motherboard so more PCI-e lanes so you can space the GPU's better.

whyscotty · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:26

Hold off and get your 290's underwater

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:27

Can't you get creative with some fan placement just to tide you over until next month? Seems a lot of hassle just to keep temps under control for a few weeks. Space the cards out further, use a slower pci-e slot. I doubt you will notice a drop in performance and once the month is up you can go water and forget about it. More space between the cards means cooler temps.

shankly1985 · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:30

LtMatt said:
Can't you get creative with some fan placement just to tide you over until next month? Seems a lot of hassle just to keep temps under control for a few weeks. Space the cards out further, use a slower pci-e slot. I doubt you will notice a drop in performance and once the month is up you can go water and forget about it. More space between the cards means cooler temps.

I noticed massive performance loss going 4x Tomb raider was around 50fps loss lol

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:31

shankly1985 said:
I noticed massive performance loss going 4x Tomb raider was around 50fps loss lol

That could've been something to do with TressFX though. I didn't notice much difference in BF3-4 from a slower pci-e lane. Point being it will do for a few weeks until he can go water. I expect he's got silly fps in bf4 on mantle currently.

shankly1985 · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:33

LtMatt said:
That could've been something to do with TressFX though. I didn't notice much difference in BF3-4 from a slower pci-e lane. Point being it will do for a few weeks until he can go water. I expect he's got silly fps in bf4 on mantle currently.

I did when running Mantle, remember me telling you about your graph in Windows mode looked like mine when using 4x

Honestly mate the performance in everything I tested was shocking. I wouldn't of spent the amount on new MB if it was only couple frames

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:34

shankly1985 said:
I did when running Mantle, remember me telling you about your graph in Windows mode looked like mine when using 4x

Honestly mate the performance in everything I tested was shocking. I wouldn't of spent the amount on new MB if it was only couple frames

That was only in windowed mode though. Johan already said theres lots of overheard if you use windowed mode crossfire in Mantle. He should at least try it, i bet he wouldn't see too much of a difference.

BaDBoY_uK · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:34

Thanks for your comments guys

I think I can hold out. TBH I am just impatient. My top card has hit 95 on a warm day and it throttles. Saying that, I still get 120fps on BF4

I'll wait until next month and get the 2 x Rev2 blocks and a nice pump. In the meantime I may take Matt's advice and getto up some fans - God knows I have done it before

BaDBoY_uK · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:35

BTW with these, am I best trying to exhaust air away from them or push cold air onto them???

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:35

Ghetto fan cooling immediately = +200XP Man Points. :cool:

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:37

BaDBoY_uK said:
BTW with these, am I best trying to exhaust air away from them or push cold air onto them???

Blow cold air in the right sides of the gpu's and exhaust hot air on top of the cards. So that fan picture you posted earlier, turn it the other way and place it on top. Two hot zones, one on the core and one on the vrms. You should be able to feel the heat coming up from these two areas. One fan might just cover both areas, if not worry most about the core.

shankly1985 · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:37

BaDBoY_uK said:
Thanks for your comments guys

I think I can hold out. TBH I am just impatient. My top card has hit 95 on a warm day and it throttles. Saying that, I still get 120fps on BF4

I'll wait until next month and get the 2 x Rev2 blocks and a nice pump. In the meantime I may take Matt's advice and getto up some fans - God knows I have done it before

Is your card blower type or custom cooler?

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:38

shankly1985 said:
Is your card blower type or custom cooler?

He has the same cards as you.

Marine-RX179 · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:41

BaDBoY_uK said:
BTW with these, am I best trying to exhaust air away from them or push cold air onto them???

The reference blower cooler exhaust pretty much most of the heat out the rear, so I say it's more important to feed the cooler's intake with more cool air.

I don't think having a fan blowing into the coolers' intake would help much, unless there's a cool air source intaking from outside of the case. Might worth considering moving the HDDs elsewhere and removing the drives-slot-ins to allow more cool air to reach the graphic cards more easily.

BaDBoY_uK · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:45

^^Forget that pic - that's with a 6990+6970 for ages ago haha!

This is a current pic

So, where should I getto some fans to?

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:53

Two suggestions.

1) Stick a fan on the edge of the backplate and have it pushing the hot air the gpu's kick out down towards your HDD's. Hopefully then your bottom 120MM intake will help naturally push the air towards the vents above your gpu's. Positive pressure in your case will help this.

2) Stick a fan right on top of both gpu's so it sucks the heat out of both and moves it further away from the gpu's. The problem will be gpu 1 is sucking in gpu 2's heat. This may solve that, or at least lessen the effect. If that does not work, turn the fan over and see if that helps.

That's all ive got for now. Over to Marine and Shankly.

Marine-RX179 · 30 Apr 2014 at 12:59

BaDBoY_uK said:
^^Forget that pic - that's with a 6990+6970 for ages ago haha!

This is a current pic

So, where should I getto some fans to?

Ah I see. Your biggest issue at the moment is that your case is not really doing much good at exhausting the heat from the inside of the case to outside, particular with the heat that are being dump inside the case by the TwinFrozR coolers building up way faster than the little amount that get exhausted outside, thus the heat would just get recycle back into the vga coolers.

Normally the best thing to do would be to mount fan on the side-panel as exhaust, so less heat from the bottom card get feed into the top card as well as reducing the amount of heat build up at the lower-half of the case), but since your window panel doesn't have a fan mount, you might have to considering other options.

But the biggest issue I still believe is to do with the two cards being to close together with the top card struggling to breath (and the little air that it gets is heat from the bottom card). Triple-slot/2.5 slot cards with dump into case type cooler in crossfire ain't gonna be pretty (temp wise).

old gamer · 30 Apr 2014 at 13:00

just a thought but after reading gibbos review of which 290 to buy he said the backplate on the msi gaming editon heats up and retains the heat, so wonderd with crossfire what if the backplate on the lower card was removed would temps improve on the card above it, not sure how easy it is to remove but think i would be tempted to try it

LtMatt · 30 Apr 2014 at 13:02

old gamer said:
just a thought but after reading gibbos review of which 290 to buy he said the backplate on the msi gaming editon heats up and retains the heat, so wonderd with crossfire what if the backplate on the lower card was removed would temps improve on the card above it, not sure how easy it is to remove but think i would be tempted to try it

You may be an old gamer, but you're definitely wise beyond your years.