At first, this seemed like a simple matter. Quite frankly, i'm embarrassed to have to ask this, but it has gotten to the point where i needed some outside opinions.
I recently got a second GTX580 on sale and wanted to put it in SLi. This works perfectly driver wise and i'm getting very strong performance boosts. My problem is heat. I'm fairly certain my case is adequate and there is a empty slot between the cards(CM HAF X case, Asus p8p67 pro motherboard) But the slot 1 card still heats up like crazy. With just one card, I was able to clock it to 830mhz on air and it stayed under 75C full load. With Sli, the second card is fine, however the first was well over 95C. At this point, I lowered the clock all the way to 730mhz. This kept the cards stable(card one: 80C card two: 67C) My question is: Does anyone have any experience with this? (yes, i know the temps are ok, but i really don't consider downclocking 100mhz a victory) If so, what do you recommend (I dont even care about overclocking anymore, just maybe getting stock again?)
tl;dr Problem with GTX580 sli cooling; solutions?
ensign_lee United States. August 21 2012 06:16. Posts 1016
580's are notorious for being hot. Your only real solution is to put water blocks on them and go water cooling if you really want to keep both of them rather than just keeping one card or upgrading to one card.
iKill[ShocK] Vietnam. August 21 2012 06:16. Posts 1169
Get more fans for your case? Move to a different area thats cooler? Set up your air flow a different way? Watercooling? Different heatsink? Thats all the solutions i can think of for now.
"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit"
treeco72 United States. August 21 2012 06:48. Posts 41
just float a fan with wire if you need to in front of the cards to help push air between the two cards cooling the one on top which is the one most at risk.
z0rz United States. August 21 2012 07:18. Posts 113
Whatever software you are using to change the clock speeds of the cards must have an option to adjust the fan speeds as well. Just crank up the fan speeds rather than having them set to 'auto' and you should be fine.
you could try to zip tie a 120mm fan at the front of the cards to push more air to the first card.
pros: cheap cons: will lower temps but not that much. probably still noisy
another option (since you do not want real water cooling) is you could strap a closed loop cooling (antec kuhler, corsair hydro series,etc.) to your cards to lower both your temps and noise. there are special brackets out there that will allow you to install closed loops coolers to your vid card.
pros: cheaper than real wc, lowers temps and noise cons: a little more expensive (will cost $100+), and you have to be comfortable dismantling your videocard.
Last edit: 2012-08-21 07:54:22
imallinson United Kingdom. August 21 2012 07:54. Posts 2054
The problem will be because the hot air has nowhere to go so instead of dragging new, cold air over the heat pipes the air is just cycling through getting hotter and hotter as it goes. Water cooling would be the best solution but if you don't want to go that route try putting a fan at the far end of the cards to pull the air towards the front of the case (this will be more effective if you have a fan pushing air out the case at the front as well). You may want to shuffle your hard drives around so you aren't blowing the hot air over them.
I prefer reference design blower models as they are made to not blow heat back into the chassis and instead promote circulation of new air into the case. Its true that fan models are better at cooling, but after the second card passing the same air between eachother simply doesnt work.
However not all is lost and there are many solutions here.
First up is to use a tool like MSI Afterburner to manually control the fan speed of your cards (you can create fan profiles as well if I am not mistaken). You can push the fans as high as 75 percent. More then that and you risk damaging the fan.
Second up is to procure an extremely high CFM case fan if you need to. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835213001 Have these as intake at the front of the case. Thats a 240 CFM fan. One of these is enough to run Quad 5870 or 7970's right next to eachother with all four of them bitcoin mining (think of it as running furmark 24/7) and I dont think I even need to turn the GPU fans on.
Be warned. Neither of these solutions are quiet. But I assume that people who do 580 SLI on air have given up on quiet.
twitch.tv/medrea
Myrmidon United States. August 21 2012 08:58. Posts 8478
HAF X already has a large side panel fan blowing on the expansion slot area, so I'm not sure adding more fans would help much unless they're gearing for takeoff.
Maybe you can just increase spacing between the video cards. The bottom slot is PCIe 2.0 x4, unfortunately, but that would probably result in better temperatures. If you're really brave suicidal and don't move the case around much, you could maybe get a flexible riser card extension for a PCIe x16 slot (maybe a long SLI bridge as well, if necessary), and find another place to rig the second card, with foam / tape / whatever, propping it up somehow.
This was to setup the card for remote insertion into a PCI-e 1x slot but yes it helps with cooling as well. Someday it might even become standard.
But if you look you will see I have 1 lane of space between my 7970 and 5830. The 5770 is hanging out in the air. It doesnt generate heat anyway but yeah being raised has benefits.
Last edit: 2012-08-21 09:34:35
twitch.tv/medrea
phar United States. August 21 2012 09:40. Posts 566
Be warned: those deltas are loud as fuck. Medrea is not doing them justice describing them as "not quiet". They're 1000 times louder than a quiet-ish 120mm. They are incredibly awesome though.
Last edit: 2012-08-21 09:41:27
Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?
On August 21 2012 09:43 phar wrote: Yeaaa I can imagine! You could make music with them.
You might want different-speed fans or better yet, a fan controller—or even better: a programmable fan controller operating on a script with user-defined voltage over time—for that.
phar United States. August 21 2012 15:52. Posts 566
haha, thanks guys. Moving the hard drives helped a bit. and yea, the pcie extension actually has crossed my mind a few times i also have my fans set to idle at 50% (the most i can bear to hear; when i'm actually gaming, i have headset on)
treeco72 United States. August 23 2012 06:10. Posts 41
hey, i just tried messing around in precision. I wasn't able to get the cards any cooler, but by unsyncing them (GPU0 = 730mhz, GPU1 = 770mhz) I was able to get a couple extra frames (and now the cards both just run load at 75-80 instead of one 80 and one 65) hmm whatever i guess
JingleHell United States. August 23 2012 06:29. Posts 11262
That's a very gamble-ish solution, since you're dealing with AFR. Normally with a good SLI rig, microstutters won't be a big deal since the frame times will still be incredibly short, but when you're de-synced, there's a good chance it will start to smack you around a bit.
http://jinglehelltech.blogspot.com -- Pics of my rig in Profile
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/34863088/photo%20%282%29.jpg)
Similar to what you can do remotely using beep frequencies on a lab full of unix boxes.
JingleHell United States. August 23 2012 06:29. Posts 11262
