Zotac 560ti "448" OC SLI heating issues

[spixelspixel]

Do you have your pc near a heater? That thermal armour on your motherboard might not be helping things either, hot air could be getting trapped there.

 

[yerjam]

Do you have your pc near a heater? That thermal armour on your motherboard might not be helping things either, hot air could be getting trapped there.

No it's under a desk near a window atm. You could be right about the thermal armor although with that downward blowing CPU cooler air gets pushed onto the CPU then goes out through the armor anyway. I'll try installing the assist fan (a 50mm fan that blows air into the middle of the motherboard) onto the armor again tomorrow and see if that helps things.

 

[ReAPeR101]

When i had my Antec 300 case, the temps in my case GTX 570s in SLI got very hot, wiring was good, however airflow unfortunately was not great. Temps got very high, so high in fact that i decided to take the plunge and get a High Air Flow gaming case for my SLI set up.

When i changed to the HAF922 case, all my troubles ended with high temps.

Looking at your pic of you case. I did notice just a few things that would keep the hot air in your case, rather than pushing the air out via what i call the exhaust fan.

(i treat my PCs like i do my cars LOL, give them plenty of air, and they will perform)

Your PSU fan is pointing towards the floor, which IMO is good however i like my PSU fan to blow the air towards the top of the case, in this case, it would blow some of the hot air away from your GPUs. Also you have your CPU fan blowing against the side of the PC case. Is there an exhaust fan there or is the only exhaust fan the 1 to the left of the CPU fan. The reason i say this is because potentially if you dont have a fan there, your CPU fan will be pushing air against the side of the case and down to your GPUs. Your GPU fans will then have to work harder to push that hot air away.

In my HAF922 i have 3 200mm fans, and 2 120mm fans, 1 120mm at the bottom pushing air up through my PC, a 200mm and 120mm exhaust fan, plus i have a push/pull fan system on my CPU, this helps to push the air out quicker via the other 120mm exhaust fan. I then have the other 2 200mm fans pushing air into the case to keep things cool.

i5 2500k @ 4.5Ghz load tops 52c, idle 28/30. GTX680s idle GPU1 28 GPU2 30 load BF3 Ultra or Heaven 3 max i have seen is 79 on both fans were 55%

My personal view is airflow is the key

 

[spixelspixel]

When i had my Antec 300 case, the temps in my case GTX 570s in SLI got very hot, wiring was good, however airflow unfortunately was not great. Temps got very high, so high in fact that i decided to take the plunge and get a High Air Flow gaming case for my SLI set up.

When i changed to the HAF922 case, all my troubles ended with high temps.

Looking at your pic of you case. I did notice just a few things that would keep the hot air in your case, rather than pushing the air out via what i call the exhaust fan.

(i treat my PCs like i do my cars LOL, give them plenty of air, and they will perform)

Your PSU fan is pointing towards the floor, which IMO is good however i like my PSU fan to blow the air towards the top of the case, in this case, it would blow some of the hot air away from your GPUs. Also you have your CPU fan blowing against the side of the PC case. Is there an exhaust fan there or is the only exhaust fan the 1 to the left of the CPU fan. The reason i say this is because potentially if you dont have a fan there, your CPU fan will be pushing air against the side of the case and down to your GPUs. Your GPU fans will then have to work harder to push that hot air away.

In my HAF922 i have 3 200mm fans, and 2 120mm fans, 1 120mm at the bottom pushing air up through my PC, a 200mm and 120mm exhaust fan, plus i have a push/pull fan system on my CPU, this helps to push the air out quicker via the other 120mm exhaust fan. I then have the other 2 200mm fans pushing air into the case to keep things cool.

i5 2500k @ 4.5Ghz load tops 52c, idle 28/30. GTX680s idle GPU1 28 GPU2 30 load BF3 Ultra or Heaven 3 max i have seen is 79 on both fans were 55%

My personal view is airflow is the key

PSU fans are intake, not exhaust

 

[yerjam]

When i had my Antec 300 case, the temps in my case GTX 570s in SLI got very hot, wiring was good, however airflow unfortunately was not great. Temps got very high, so high in fact that i decided to take the plunge and get a High Air Flow gaming case for my SLI set up.

When i changed to the HAF922 case, all my troubles ended with high temps.

Looking at your pic of you case. I did notice just a few things that would keep the hot air in your case, rather than pushing the air out via what i call the exhaust fan.

(i treat my PCs like i do my cars LOL, give them plenty of air, and they will perform)

Your PSU fan is pointing towards the floor, which IMO is good however i like my PSU fan to blow the air towards the top of the case, in this case, it would blow some of the hot air away from your GPUs. Also you have your CPU fan blowing against the side of the PC case. Is there an exhaust fan there or is the only exhaust fan the 1 to the left of the CPU fan. The reason i say this is because potentially if you dont have a fan there, your CPU fan will be pushing air against the side of the case and down to your GPUs. Your GPU fans will then have to work harder to push that hot air away.

I thought PSU fans were intakes? If I mounted it the other way around wouldn't it be drawing in all the hot air from the GPUs? I'm not sure what you mean about the CPU fans. They're blowing air downwards towards the CPU, do you mean is there an exhaust fan on the other side of the case or did you think they exhausted air towards the side of the case facing the camera?

In my HAF922 i have 3 200mm fans, and 2 120mm fans, 1 120mm at the bottom pushing air up through my PC, a 200mm and 120mm exhaust fan, plus i have a push/pull fan system on my CPU, this helps to push the air out quicker via the other 120mm exhaust fan. I then have the other 2 200mm fans pushing air into the case to keep things cool.

i5 2500k @ 4.5Ghz load tops 52c, idle 28/30. GTX680s idle GPU1 28 GPU2 30 load BF3 Ultra or Heaven 3 max i have seen is 79 on both fans were 55%

My personal view is airflow is the key

I agree, airflow is key and I think right now my system's airflow is poor for SLI; everything was fine before I installed the second GPU. For reference right now all I have is a 120mm intake on the front, a 140mm intake on the side and a 120mm exhaust at the back. I think if I install a few extra fans I can improve things, hopefully.

If anyone's wondering, I know SLI can be achieved in the Fractal R3 with decent temps, I've seen it done with two 580s before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2gZ8er-3cs.

 

[yerjam]

So I restarted my machine (again) and noticed the idle temps have gone down to 35C for the bottom card and 38C for the top card on idle. I checked GPU-Z and the clock speeds were at their normal 765MHz. I then benchmarked in Heaven 3.0 and I got the same results (833). The temps had increased to 85C on the bottom card and 90C on the top card while under load. When I checked GPU-Z again I noticed the clock speeds for both cards were down to half speed.

I reckon while under load the cards are overheating and getting throttled. I reset everything in Afterburner and the clock speeds are now back up to 765MHz.

I've ordered new fans: placing 2 120mm Air Penetrators in the front intakes and one 120mm Air penetrator in the bottom intake as well as one 140mm BitFenix Spectre Pro in the side probably as an intake.

I'm going to try a few different fan configurations when they arrive (should be here Mon or Tue) and I'll post my results here. Hopefully I'll see some improvement.

 

[spixelspixel]

So I restarted my machine (again) and noticed the idle temps have gone down to 35C for the bottom card and 38C for the top card on idle. I checked GPU-Z and the clock speeds were at their normal 765MHz. I then benchmarked in Heaven 3.0 and I got the same results (833). The temps had increased to 85C on the bottom card and 90C on the top card while under load. When I checked GPU-Z again I noticed the clock speeds for both cards were down to half speed.

I reckon while under load the cards are overheating and getting throttled. I reset everything in Afterburner and the clock speeds are now back up to 765MHz.

I've ordered new fans: placing 2 120mm Air Penetrators in the front intakes and one 120mm Air penetrator in the bottom intake as well as one 140mm BitFenix Spectre Pro in the side probably as an intake.

I'm going to try a few different fan configurations when they arrive (should be here Mon or Tue) and I'll post my results here. Hopefully I'll see some improvement.

Strange, they shouldn't be getting that hot.and your heaven score should be around 2000 or more. My single gtx 570 scores over 1,100 with same settings and regular 560ti over 1,000.

Reset speeds again, set both fans to 80/90 percent and run heaven again. Should keep temps down and see if the clocks stick this time.

Also go to nvidia control panel and reset everything there.

 

[mranderson]

I've had the same problem with both a 560 and a 560ti Zotac. The cooler is not the reference one and I wonder if the heatpipe number/dimensions are different. I've even tried reapplying thermal paste but did not have a significant effect. Temps in the 90 under load in an open case.

 

[yerjam]

Strange, they shouldn't be getting that hot.and your heaven score should be around 2000 or more. My single gtx 570 scores over 1,100 with same settings and regular 560ti over 1,000.

Reset speeds again, set both fans to 80/90 percent and run heaven again. Should keep temps down and see if the clocks stick this time.

Also go to nvidia control panel and reset everything there.

It is quite strange, i read some reviews and benchmarks before buying these cards and theyre meant to be on par with standard 570s. I'll try reducing the clock speeds later when im back from work.

Another thing ive just noticed is the chassis fans i have atm dont really push much air; the front intake barely gets any air past the hd cages and i could blow harder than the side intake haha. Another reason im eager to try out some new fans.

 

[yerjam]

Strange, they shouldn't be getting that hot.and your heaven score should be around 2000 or more. My single gtx 570 scores over 1,100 with same settings and regular 560ti over 1,000.

Reset speeds again, set both fans to 80/90 percent and run heaven again. Should keep temps down and see if the clocks stick this time.

Also go to nvidia control panel and reset everything there.

Apologies mate, I misread that, thought you meant reduce the clock speeds.

I reset everything in the Nvidia control panel and set the fans to 85 in Afterburner. Under load the top card hit 72C and the bottom 65C which is a great improvement in the temps. However I'm still getting a really low score (831 this time). I ran furmark with the fans on 85 for a while and I noticed that the cards were still getting throttled (normally by around 380MHz, but the top GPU got throttled by as much as 570MHz on occasion) even though the temps rarely increased above 70C for the top card and 65C for the bottom.

I'm not really sure what's going on now if the GPUs are still getting throttled at those temps.

(Also my chassis fans were running full speed during the benchmarks)

 

[spixelspixel]

Nvidia nerfs cards when furmark is running so can't really trust that. Did you try a different sli bridge? Maybe try a different benchmark like vantage.

 

[yerjam]

Nvidia nerfs cards when furmark is running so can't really trust that. Did you try a different sli bridge? Maybe try a different benchmark like vantage.

I can't run Vantage, when I try to open it I get an error message saying it can't start because "PhysXLoader.dll" is missing. I re-installed it and got the same error message again, then I completely uninstalled it, downloaded it again and got the same error message. According to their website if you keep getting that particular error message PhysX might not be installed on your system; so I reinstalled the Nvidia 296.1 drivers and got the same error message even though PhysX was installed. I then tried the 301.24 beta drivers, PhysX installed and I got the same error message with Vantage, not sure what that's about.

Earlier I tried each card by itself in the top PCI-e slot and I got the exact same score in Heaven for each card (833 again). It's worth noting that before I got the second card I was scoring around 1400.

Also atm I only have one SLI bridge, I did try installing it the other way around and still had the same issue.

I have absolutely no idea what's going on. I even tried updating my BIOS but saw no improvement.

I wonder if it would be worth my while to contact Zotac and/or Asus (my mboard manufacturer) and describing my problems to them?

 

[spixelspixel]

Do you have disable ppu enabled on vantage?

Here's some more things to try

Uninstall drivers again, then run driver sweeper. When installing the drivers select advanced then tick 'perform clean install'

Try resetting cmos on motherboard/load defaults in bios.

If those fail then you should contact asus+zotac. Performance problem could be related to either of them.

 

[chipachap]

Do your cards have an exhaust pushing air out the back or does it just dissipate from the radiator on the card? With it being non-ref the cooler probably doesn't expel the air strictly out the back of the card but it just dissipates around it on the inside. Two cards doing this and the heat off your CPU could be causing the bad temps if there's just hot air circulating.

If this is your case http://www.google.ie/imgres?imgurl=...Fe6T4XMEsHChAfhq4HWCA&ved=0CGMQ9QEwAw&dur=606 then the two fans at the top should be pushing air out rather than in since the hot air rises and the fan at the back, side, and bottom should blow air into the case so the hot air is being driven upwards out of your case and the other fans blowing cooler air on the components helps aswell as creating a lot of air flow.

EDIT: Do not use Furmark for anything. It will skew any results your trying to achieve and rapes cards.

EDIT 2: What MoBo do you have? If it can't support at least PCI-E 2.0 x 8 for the 2 lanes then that could be why your score is down but it wouldn't explain temps.

 

[spixelspixel]

His motherboard is asus sabertooth which supports SLI. All SLI motherboards support at least x8 x8 which performs better than x16 x4 (cheap motherboads which are crossfire only)

 

[yerjam]

Do you have disable ppu enabled on vantage?

Here's some more things to try

Uninstall drivers again, then run driver sweeper. When installing the drivers select advanced then tick 'perform clean install'

Try resetting cmos on motherboard/load defaults in bios.

If those fail then you should contact asus+zotac. Performance problem could be related to either of them.

Well spixelspixel, I officially owe you a pint or four.

Last night just to make sure I completely rewired my system. I re-done everything short of taking the mboard out. When rewiring I made sure to keep my wiring as tidy as possible so as not to cut off airflow to the cards especially.

Then I uninstalled the Nvidia drivers again, then cleaned in driver sweeper. Then just to make sure I searched for all files and folders that had "Nvidia" on it in my computer and deleted them. Then I rebooted, loaded defaults in bios, rebooted again, and done a clean install with the Nvidia 301.24 drivers. I loaded up Afterburner to monitor the temps and started benching in Heaven 3.0. I immediately knew the cards were performing well when my FPS shot up to 60 right off the bat.

Low and behold: http://i.imgur.com/0IKVO.jpg (if anyone doesn't want to click the link I scored 2066).

Temps for the cards - Top: 89C Bottom 85C.

Temps are a bit higher than I'd like but when my new case fans arrive tomorrow I'll hopefully be able to improve things a little.

Thanks a bunch to everyone for helping me out. This is my first build so I honestly had no idea what I was doing wrong but if I had to guess I would imagine it was driver related and completely removing the drivers and doing a clean install fixed this.

Special thanks to spixelspixel, you're a legend mate!

 

[spixelspixel]

Congrats, nice score too

To help with the temps try setting up a custom fan profile in msi afterburner so when it reaches around 70 degrees the fan ramps up to stop it getting any higher. Go to settings -> fan then enable user defined software automatic fan control.

 

[yerjam]

Congrats, nice score too

To help with the temps try setting up a custom fan profile in msi afterburner so when it reaches around 70 degrees the fan ramps up to stop it getting any higher. Go to settings -> fan then enable user defined software automatic fan control.

Will do, I'll tinker around with some fan profiles for my chassis fans too, hopefully things will improve a little.

Do your cards have an exhaust pushing air out the back or does it just dissipate from the radiator on the card? With it being non-ref the cooler probably doesn't expel the air strictly out the back of the card but it just dissipates around it on the inside. Two cards doing this and the heat off your CPU could be causing the bad temps if there's just hot air circulating.

If this is your case http://www.google.ie/imgres?imgurl=...Fe6T4XMEsHChAfhq4HWCA&ved=0CGMQ9QEwAw&dur=606 then the two fans at the top should be pushing air out rather than in since the hot air rises and the fan at the back, side, and bottom should blow air into the case so the hot air is being driven upwards out of your case and the other fans blowing cooler air on the components helps aswell as creating a lot of air flow.

EDIT: Do not use Furmark for anything. It will skew any results your trying to achieve and rapes cards.

EDIT 2: What MoBo do you have? If it can't support at least PCI-E 2.0 x 8 for the 2 lanes then that could be why your score is down but it wouldn't explain temps.

They're meant to exhaust out the back but they do dump quite a lot of hot air into the case too, since installing them temps in my case have increased a great deal. Like I say I'm replacing the chassis fans tomorrow and installing a few more to help improve airflow as well as experimenting with a few different fan configurations, hopefully I can improve things.