3-way SLi with DirectCU II or reference cooler ?

[Gripen90]

I know it may sound stupid, but I have 3x Club 3D GeForce GTX 670 2GB cards with reference cooler in 3-way SLi and the hottest card - middle card gets around 85*c degrees celcius in load and that with the auto fan control in the nvidia driver.


I have one Asus GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB card arriving soon for my little ITX gaming LAN machine. Only this card is on sale for £272 (normal price is £376) and but I've been thinking about getting two more GTX 670 4GB card and put 3 of them in my main gaming rig instead, and then put one of the Club3D GTX 670 2GB cards in the ITX LAN machine, since that would be fine.
However I have not been able to find information on whether setting 3x Asus GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II in 3-way-SLi to be a good or bad idea heat wise ?
Will the cards be overheating since it's not blower style fans or is the DirectCU II cooler competent enought to let all cards be cool under load ?

I'd really like to upgrade to 4GB cards since I'm getting a 2560x1440 screen for my birthday (may 26th). Getting GTX 700 series cards will just be too expensive for me.

 

[andybird123]

I would wait and see personally, gtx 770 may well be about the same price as 4gb 670s are now, or they might drop to clear stock

 

[Gripen90]

I would wait and see personally, gtx 770 may well be about the same price as 4gb 670s are now, or they might drop to clear stock

Well the GTX 770 should replace the GTX 680's and their price range... I don't know if that will cause any additional drop than what it is now for that kind of card. I think the GTX 770 will see a release price of around £390~400.

 

[Kaapstad]

Three Asus GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB cards would probably be even worse than what you have got now for heat in the case.

I would wait for now too.

Have you thought about a bigger case with better airflow, which would also give you the opportunity to watercool the CPU at the very least. This would help the temps on your cards as all the heat from the CPU would be pushed out the case by the rad.

 

[Gripen90]

Three Asus GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB cards would probably be even worse than what you have got now for heat in the case.

I would wait for now too.

Have you thought about a bigger case with better airflow, which would also give you the opportunity to watercool the CPU at the very least. This would help the temps on your cards as all the heat from the CPU would be pushed out the case by the rad.

Yea that's what I'm afraid of. I know 2-way Sli with these kind of coolers is possible and rarely presents any heat issue. I used to run Gigabyte GTX 460 Windforce II OC 1GB cards in SLi if a noise damped Fractal case and they ran cool and silent.
3-way SLi is a different beast, and that's why if with all my 3-way SLi setups since GTX 280 have been cards with reference coolers (GTX 280, 470, 580).

I guess that I'd max be running 2-way SLi with those Asus GeForce TX 670 DirectCU II 4GB cards... which really isn't an option.

As for a larger case - my computer desk is not that tall, so the tallest case I can fit under there is something like 55 cm max - which an Antec Eleven hundred eventually will be able to fit under. It will probably be the future case I'll upgrade to when I'll be doing a totally new system build again.

As for H20 cooling... I had a Corsair H50 on my Phenom II X4 965 some years ago, but I was really anxious about the durability etc to a stage where I almost got paraniod to check for leaks etc so it would not burn up my HD5970+5850 TriFire setup. After that I decided to keep the O2 cooling as I'm really uncomfortable with H2O cooling... it may sound illogical, but I have "OCD behavior" with H2O solutions, I just don't trust them.