GTX 280 Tri SLI

chiLLZ · 29 May 2009 at 03:41

hey everyone

I have three GTX 280 cards and they seem to get really hot when playing Clear Sky, temp's are reaching almost 90 on at least two cards with fan speed getting to 100 % with in 5 minits of gameing, is this normal for tri sli? the bottom card seems cooler then the others for some reason.

I have the gigabyte ud5 motherboard which has no gaps between cards, this doen not help i guess. Another question I have is, is it better to have the case side fan by the video cards pushing cold air on to them or the other way round exausting the hot air?

maybe its time for water cooling which I am not too keen on as it seems a bit daunting.

is anyone running gtx 280 cards succsessfully in tri sli?

Mojo · 29 May 2009 at 05:25

It's the gap between the cards, or rather, the lack of such a gap. The slot cooler requires decent airflow to the forward bottom of the card for the fan to pull it into the heatsink then out the back and out the back of the motherboard. Tri-slot Motherboards are bad for this as the normal ATX motherboard cannot supply enough room between slots to allow decent air cooling for double slot card in each Pci-e slot. To lower temps, all I can suggest is aftermarket GPU coolers or Water cooling

*edit* GTX280s run hot anyway, quick torture test and mine hit 85 degrees, hate to think how bad it would be with the fan covered over

Ninja Please! · 29 May 2009 at 06:23

Have you tried seeing if leaving the side of your pc case off helped it at all? That may help bring down temps. I would think because of heat rising that it would be normal for the bottom one to run cooler, also some boards will run the last card at 8x, so that may play into it.

widdyst · 29 May 2009 at 07:23

the bottom card runs cooler because it isnt pulling hot air off the top of another card and it has less work to do as the top two cards will manage most of the rendering most of the time. I ran tri 260's and they too had only very small gaps between them, but i modded my side panel with a 220mm fan blowing straight at them and temps seemed fine around 70 max.
What case and cooling do you currently have ?

chiLLZ · 29 May 2009 at 11:54

Thanks for the replies, I tried it with the side of the case off and later with the side panel back on changing the direction of the sidepanel fan, this all had a very small impact on tempratures. I have three intake fans and three fans pushing air out. One exhaust on top one at the back and one on the side panel.

After doing some searching I found that people are undervolting their cards to 1.03v in the videocads bios, this help a a lot because the fans no longer go to 100% hopefully it will be stable.

Psypher5 · 29 May 2009 at 11:55

your running 3 gert big cards in tri sli, where normally one gets hot enough on its own, and your wondering why its hot?

vertica · 29 May 2009 at 12:03

my tri sli setup used to run that hot, if not hotter. The cards are spec-ed up to ~120C so 90 is nothing to be worried about.

Once things start going over 100 then maybe consider improving airflow etc, but they are cuurently well within operating conditions so dont be concerned.

zytok · 29 May 2009 at 12:20

as I doubt you're gaining much by having the third one in, why not just run two with a gap in between and sell the third one?

Caracus2k · 29 May 2009 at 12:48

As mentioned above tri Sli is best watercooled due to the tremendous amounts of heat being generated.

chiLLZ · 29 May 2009 at 15:58

Psypher5 said:
your running 3 gert big cards in tri sli, where normally one gets hot enough on its own, and your wondering why its hot?

wondering how to cool them down

things seem a lot better now i can play games without getting distracted by the fans getting too loud, still very hot though.

i run three cards because i do see a difference in performance in some games although most games are ok with two cards.

Ch3m1c4L · 29 May 2009 at 16:30

i found running just two in a super tower was pretty hot, especially at lan, although not as bad as yours, only went up to about 85 on the hotter card, but yea the top cards are allways hotter, unless you put your case on its side? Watercooling for the win

chaparral · 29 May 2009 at 19:09

vertica said:
The cards are spec-ed up to ~120C so 90 is nothing to be worried about.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gtx_280_us.html

Maximum GPU Temperature (in C) 105 C

Schnippzle · 29 May 2009 at 20:06

If you are really worried about temps, watercool them. I doubt any air-cooled (yes I know radiators are air cooled

) solution would really solve your problem.

HAz · 29 May 2009 at 20:20

Schnippzle said:
If you are really worried about temps, watercool them. I doubt any air-cooled (yes I know radiators are air cooled ) solution would really solve your problem.

u think he can afford that lol? hes just bought 3 280 gtx's

Schnippzle · 29 May 2009 at 20:22

HAz said:
u think he can afford that lol? hes just bought 3 280 gtx's

Well... there is dedication to gaming, and there is DEDICATION to gaming

w3bbo · 29 May 2009 at 20:23

Are you aware your bottom (orange slot) is only running at half the bandwidth of the blue ones? I considered going tri-sli but the power requirements vs the performance gain just really didn't seem worth it. I game on a 30" screen and noticed very little difference with TriSLI, what game in particular can you notice and improvement?

chiLLZ · 30 May 2009 at 00:23

I notice a difference in performance in Clear Sky at certain places where there is heavy foilage and shadows. One place in the game where my system was worse before adding the third gtx 280 was in the dark vally near the farmstead. I got a lot of mouse lag and low fps like around 35 to 45. Now i am getting 50 to 60 there and there is no mouse lag. I have only had this card for three days so i still have to test more games.

heres a screen of where i am talking about and fps:

heres a screen of the tempratures I am getting now, there seems to be much improvement except on videocard insists on running high fan speed even at low temps, its the top one.

I am aware thet the orange slot runs at 8x, infact GPUZ says that two of the three pcie 2.0 slots are currantly at 8x. Have you seen this article at hardocp.com? it compares the performance of full 16x tri sli with the nforce 200 chip and x58 16x 8x 8x, pretty much no real world difference but the nforce 200 chip adds latency.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTYwNiwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Its a pity intel disallowd nvidia from making motherboards for i7 because the 790i motherboard had full support for 16x sli without the crappy nforce chip.

thevet · 30 May 2009 at 13:09

the only game i iknow of that improves fps in tri sli is Crysis...tri sli is not needed for anything else...crysis will give you a constant 60fps with tri sli at 1920 full detail,full aa etc:To be honest tri sli is not really needed at the moment...but 2x sli is essential for a constant 60fps is 99% of the latest games

chiLLZ · 30 May 2009 at 13:50

well I prefer how this game feels with three cards, i got the third one because with two cards the game felt a little sluggish in places, its not all about fps like i said i got mouse lag it felt like vsync was on when it wasnt, i mean if i was satisfied with the performance i would have left it alone with two cards

I dont even need two cards really, any game will play with the right settings