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Help with cooling xfire 290s.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice

Sacrifice

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Joined
26 Oct 2013
Posts
365
Hi, I posted this in the overclocking and coolers section, but no one has responded, seeing as I am looking to cool gpu's I guess this is okay to post here

In short, here's what I'm thinking (let me know of any better suggestions):

  • My 290s are very very close to each other, so I want to hopefully decrease temps and obviously noise
  • Two HG10 brackets
  • Two H55 coolers (Any alternatives recommended, will this be enough?)
  • Two replacement fans for the AIO coolers. (This is where I need suggestions as I know nothing, hopefully lower temps, but noise is the more important if I had to choose.) (Are the h55 stock fans even in need of replacing?)
  • I also assume two will be fit crossfire, if not I'll hack out a small part of the bracket to make the tubes fit.
  • For the fans, my mobo has one cpu fan connector(the other taken by my cpu cooler), and 3/4 chassis fan connectors, which I assume are also PWM. Will I need to go about setting up a curve for the fans? I can't exactly remember what temperatures I can link the curve to, as they would be classed as chassis fans would they not?

Any help even if you can't answer all of my questions would be really appreciated!
 
When I had a single 290 I ran a H55 AIO along with a Kraken G10 bracket.
I found the H55 fine for cooling the GPU, once I had managed to fit some heatsinks to the Vram & Vrm's.
Without the heatsinks I managed to kill 2x cards in the matter of 5 days :o

I used SP120 QE fans for cooling, & found temps to be around 65c after a decent gaming session. Noise however was much much quieter than the stock cooler.
 
Ah yeah, the hg10's, whilst expensive, seem to handle VRM cooling really well, and I don't want to kill my cards. :) I was also thinking of getting sp120's. Were yours PWM? Did you even find that you needed to control the speed?

EDIT: Sorry for all the questions, your setup sounds almost identical to mine, and you are a golden nugget on info for me right now! Thanks for also responding so quickly!
 
Yep, I controlled the fans on mine via the bios on my motherboard.
Set them to increase in speed when temps hit a certain point. To be fair they never ran at more than 70% most of the time.

Alternative fans, which I use now are the alaska piranha fans.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=fg-073-ak
very quiet, & move decent air.

the corsair bracket wasn't around when i had my set-up, but i think it is a better option than the g10.

picture of how mine was set-up.



I was very pleased with the performance of it, very quiet & temps were on average 20c cooler than when on stock cooler.
I moved to a 295x2 which was crap, & now have 2x Gigabyte G1 970's which I'm very happy with dispite the current Vram scandal.
 
Yeah, there's no way the g10's would fit on my mini ATX mobo. Well, anyway thanks man, just ordered my kit. When you say you set the speed to temps, you mean gpu temps?
 
I actually have exactly the setup you're looking to get - a pair of 290s, both with HG10s and H55s.

How many slots do you have between your cards? If you can squeeze in a PCI exhaust fan, then I'd recommend it.
 
Bonjour said:
I actually have exactly the setup you're looking to get - a pair of 290s, both with HG10s and H55s.

How many slots do you have between your cards? If you can squeeze in a PCI exhaust fan, then I'd recommend it.
Click to expand...

Ah cool one, got a £3 crappy led case fan I could possibly fit. Perhaps if I swap my front intake with the h55 pulling through the rad to free up one of the two side 120mm slots, or just have the two rads on the side intake exhausting.
 
Seems a lot of money to spend on soon to be old tech. Have you thought of just water cooling the top card?

I did this with 680's and the bottom card had the same temps as if it were running on its own.
 
I meant more like this:

0Yk06qC.jpg


It will help get rid of heat that would otherwise gather around the graphics cards. I found there was a rather hot packet of air gathering in the corner there before I installed the PCI exhaust fan.

What case are you planning to do this in?
 
Ah I see, my mobo only has 2 16x and a 4x, and the two 16x are only two slots apart. The space between the cards is similar to this in my case:

dmy1ww.png

The case is some cheapo casecom (5788 I think). But it does the job.

Just out of curiosity, what were your temps?
 
Last edited:
Just a thought to save some money, if you have an m-atx mobo in an ATX case could you not just use a x16 PCI riser rippon cable and mount the card below your motherboard?
 
Sacrifice said:
Ah I see, my mobo only has 2 16x and a 4x, and the two 16x are only two slots apart. The space between the cards is similar to this in my case:

dmy1ww.png

The case is some cheapo casecom (5788 I think). But it does the job.

Just out of curiosity, what were your temps?
Click to expand...

That should be alright with HG10s, but there's no way I'd run air cooled 290s like that.

How about putting a PCI exhaust fan below the 2nd card? It'd still expel a lot of the warm air.

My temps.. Both cards idle at around 30C. Under load, the top card runs about 10 degrees hotter than the lower card, at 50C vs. 40C.
 
Bonjour said:
That should be alright with HG10s, but there's no way I'd run air cooled 290s like that.

How about putting a PCI exhaust fan below the 2nd card? It'd still expel a lot of the warm air.

My temps.. Both cards idle at around 30C. Under load, the top card runs about 10 degrees hotter than the lower card, at 50C vs. 40C.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, I have a fan on the side covering the bottom gpu and the small gap between as an intake of colder air at the moment. Which will be changed to an exhaust push fan for one of the h55s which will hopefully get rid of the pocket (this will probably raise temps, but after running them like that, anything less is a blessing.)
 
Sacrifice said:
Ah I see, my mobo only has 2 16x and a 4x, and the two 16x are only two slots apart. The space between the cards is similar to this in my case:
Click to expand...

If thats how far apart they are then its going to be a bit of a struggle to get a Kraken to fit (just look at Robzere31 pic) no way would you get a Kraken to fit s for the HG 10 to fit its going to be tight and the pipes would probably stop you.

Bottom card no problem if you have the space.
 
Don't know if it's possible on 2 slot jobs with an aio though due to the pipes, even if you don't use a G10.

If you look at the top 290X, the pipes don't go any flusher against the gpu, they would push down onto the top of gpu 2.
 
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