Topic: 5970 VRM Cooling Solutions - page 2. (Read 7400 times)

There is also a second set of VRMs for the other core above the crossfire bridge logic chip. You can see it in the picture, about 1.5 inches above that second large chip like thing in the background.

Not sure if these are the VRMs you wanted, but here goes:

Looking at my temps... I'm leaning towards watercooling.

Judging by pictures, the VRM R-5 could fit your card.
http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/vga/vrm/product_vga_cooler_r5.html

Now  I cant find any official confirmation, because obviously the GPU cooler that goes with it (spitfire) is not compatible with a dual card.  I had originally bought the R5 to cool the VRMs of a 5850, and I cut the baseplate in half, so it still covered the RAM and the small memory VRM, while making place for the R5 to cool the VRMs. Worked fine (but is kind of irreversible.) I have it on my 5870 now, and clocked at 1 GHz, the VRMs have yet to exceed 62C (stock cooler, stock speed  was 115+C).

Next time you remove the baseplate, can you make some pictures of the VRMs with a ruler next to it for size? It looks exactly like the 5870 row of VRMs.

Then again, like the spitfire, the R5 is not a good idea if you have multiple cards. Its kind of big. You might be able to bend the heatpipes though, so they stand straight up.

Added another update

nice cooler but will be hard pressed to get 3 or 4 5970's on a single PC...
longer extention cables perhaps.

I have a thermal take VRM R5 to cool the VRMs of my 5870. Im not sure its compatible with the 5970, but if it is, get one, its incredible. VRM temps dont exceed 55C no matter what (down from 110+ with the stock cooler). For good measure I added a spitfire cooler for the GPU itself, and now those temps dont exceed 50C. Actually, at this very moment..  as its cooling outside (the rig is in the shed, ambient temps inside around 15C) a stunning 38.5C @900 Mhz.



GPU 0 is the 5870. The other one is a 5850.
Well, a spitfire wont work on a 5970, but the VRM cooler might. Here is a pic:

http://s8.postimage.org/paa2d2ef7/SDC10725.jpg

The VRM cooler is the "small" one with the old orange fan. Fan is completely unnecessary btw.

looking at the Arctic Cooling's 5970 HSF, the fins are vertical not horizontal so when the 120mm fans blows on it teh hot air escapes top and bottom.

the stock heatsink is vertical so adding more fans wouldn't help that much.
adding a 120mm fans and making a makeshift duct for it i think would be the simplest & best option.

Updated with new pictures.

myself I'm going to watercool.
attach my rads to cold air vent and dump the heat in the house.
come summer i can easily move the rads outside.

Aftermarket thermal pads definitely crossed my mind. 1mm pads seem to be the right fit for the 5970 VRMs?

Once my air cooling solutions are exhausted, then I might have to go to water. If nothing else, then just for the top card since the one below it hasn't given me any trouble as far as temperatures or OC limitations.

Try to pump as much air as possible into those things, or try to suck it out of them through the back. I also replaced the thermal pads with some 1mm thick Phobya thermal pads, it cooled those suckers down about 10C with 20% less fan...other than that, water cool them if you can.

Most 5970 owners probably know that the VRMs are a bottleneck to overclocking and cooling. Though they were on the market for some time, I know that the Accelero aftermarket HSF has been discontinued for some time. While I'm sure water cooling is an effective way around this problem, I'm limited to air for the time being so I want to cool these chips as best I can.

I plan on trying a couple of ideas I've read about so far. One is placing a fan below the GPUs at the bottom of the case, blowing air up to the cards. I guess the idea behind this is that it provides an additional stream of cool air in addition to the case fans blowing from front to back. If this turns out to lower the temperatures significantly, I might consider adding more fans along the way to keep this bottom to top flow moving with an exhaust fan at the top of the case and perhaps another on top of the upper GPU pulling the air from the cards and up to the exhaust.

An idea that I had which is more on the ridiculous side of the spectrum is to somehow recycle my old accelero x2 coolers (these adorned my nvidia 6800gt cards many years back) to give the VRMs their own heatsink, fan, or both. Maybe a more practical solution would be to add some copper RAM heatsinks to the chips on the top side. As for the chips under the stock HSF, I'm at a loss right now for additional cooling. Anyone experienced with the 5970 card have any pearls of wisdom?

EDIT: I finally took apart one of my cards to try and reverse-engineer my way to more efficient cooling and so far it looks promising. I've removed the stock fan and the outer shell casing, leaving the heatsink exposed.







The heatsink fins are bent at the very top, perhaps in order to channel airflow through the fins and out the exhaust. While I could just strap a few 120mm fans across the top of the card a la Arctic Cooling's 5970 HSF, what I estimate would be the most effective way to cool the heatsink would be to channel the airflow of a single 120mm fan down through the fins, possibly cutting out a makeshift duct out of cardboard to adapt the fan down to the opening of the heatsink. More updates to follow.

Another edit: I added two 120mm fans on top of the heatsink but barely got to test it out. While the GPU temps looked very promising, the VDDC sensors ran up to the 130s so I shut it down right away. I sent for some new thermal pads in the hopes of bringing these temps down.