Author

Topic: What do you do to cool your stacked GPUs? (Read 1104 times)

member
Activity: 81
Merit: 10
July 27, 2011, 02:38:19 AM
#4
I stuck some fans on top of the graphics cards with bluetack, it worked really well untill i upgraded my case to a xigmatek elysium and now i dont need the fans on there.

its better to have to air being pushed onto the cards rather than sucking the air away.

I also used a desk fan pointing at them with the side panel off
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1000
@theshmadz
hehe, pci extenders is probably best, but...

if you have your mining rig in a regular case (like I do) you might want to try stuffing something inbetween - I've used a plastic bottle cap, but I've heard styrofoam peanuts work great - to give enough of a gap to let the fan breathe.

that's the easiest, but probably not the safest (no idea what the long term effects of basically bending your card's pcb might be)

one thing you can try, depending on your card is take a close look at the cooling solution of your specific card. if it's a reference design with the blower on one end, then you probably need to keep the plastic shroud that covers the heatsink...

but,

if you have a card with a custom cooler, that plastic cover might be doing more harm than good.

I can only speak about the HIS 6950 1GB from experience, but on my card, the plastic cover does pretty much nothing except choke the fan. with the cover on (and no spacer) the cards are almost touching.

so I took the cover off for a closer look and underneath you can see the heatsink has it's own shroud to force the air across the fins.

I removed the plastic cover and now the card has enough room to stay cool (maybe only 3 or 4 millimeters, but seems to be just enough to be able to suck a decent amount of air)

but take a careful look before you try. that plastic cover might be vital to direct the airflow over the fins of the heatsink.

legendary
Activity: 966
Merit: 1004
Keep it real
PCIe extenders!
full member
Activity: 187
Merit: 100
I'm looking for any kind of tips and ideas on cooling GPUs, particularly ones that are stacked right on top of each other. I've got two dual-slot Radeon cards that are practically having sex and there are no other available PCIe slots to spread them out. If I only leave one card in the case, it's more than manageable with full load temps in the 60s, but both cards cooking each other sends them up into the 90s and that's when errors start to kick in. I'm sure there are plenty of interesting methods among bitcoin miners, and I look forward to hearing some of them! Thank you very much in advance.
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