HD 5970 X2 Cooling Question
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Depending on the cards you may need to flash the bios to unlock voltages. First though, check in your afterburner options, there may be a few check boxes that are unchecked that relate to voltage control. For my 7970s I had to check all 3 boxes related to voltage in afterburner and reboot before I could change any of the settings and have them stick. If you can under volt them don’t worry about hurting the cards. Go in steps of 10 mv down from stock and start the miner and let it run for a few minutes. Keep lowering it until your drivers crash or your computer crashes, once you get that then bump it back up 10 mv and let it run. If it crashes again later just bump the voltages a little.
You could also play with adjusting case or external fans to lower your temps. A lot of people run their cards without a real case and use box or wall fans to cool their cards.
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I adjusted the voltages, thanks for your help. They are running at about 88C now, so a small improvement. So in short, do you think its worth re-seating the heatsinks on these cards?
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Is 88C a typo? I hope you meant 78c.
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no around the 88-91c mark :(
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HD5970 are notable for running at high temperatures and dying.
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I would [b]definately[/b] do what ever is needed to drop them to 80c or below. Put a fan on them, lower your settings, etc. It’s better to mine less if that’s the case than have a several hundred dollar loss / downtime.
For mine I had a box fan driving all the heat up and away from my cards and I dropped them as low as mid to low 70s doing this. My rig is in a milkcrate rather than a computer case just FYI.
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It’s the VRMs that usually go on those. You need to keep them below 100c ideally but they can spike to 120 on occasion but wouldn’t want to keep it there to long. As for the GPU temps below 90 is OK but below 85 is preferable. Remember they are DUAL gpu boards so will naturally run hotter that single gpu cards.
As for re-applying the paste, it will most likely help if you use a good quality compound but beware the thermal pads as they’ll need to be replaced too and you need the right thickness or you’ll make it worse.
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Ok, Thanks chaps. I think at the weekend I will venture into building an open rig. Maybe go to B&Q and get me some cheap wood. I think ill leave out re-applying the TIM for now then. I work as an IT engineer, so I have access to the bits I will need, but I’ll see how taking it out of the case helps.
Cheers
Rob -
I am surprised you could not get them cooler by dropping the voltages. have you gotten them as low as they will go without crashing? Open air rigs are great if you have the space for them and the time to build one.
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The voltage thing is weird, if I drop the voltage in afterburner, it immediately goes back to default when I hit apply?
Two nights ago one of the cards fans stopped working completely. It was grinding and hardly turning at all, I pulled the card apart and it seems the cable to the fan was getting stuck in the fan blades. I glued this down, and re assembled with new TIM, and now its running about 5c cooler, result.
I pulled the other card apart today and now that’s running at about 88c rather than 91, so a slight result there too. I did notice that the card that’s running a lot hotter than the other, 78c rather than 89c, fan is about half the speed 2200RPM rather than 4000RPM. Well this I think definitely explains the temperature gap. But the question is, what’s wrong with the fan controller? Do you think re-flashing the FW will help? I read lots of horror stories about bricking cards with firmware updates, so I’m not sure whether to proceed. Or just leave it be at 90 ish centigrade.
Cheers
Rob -
Hello,
I recently bought a 5970. It’s an XFX black edition. Without any air moving through my open case, while mining the temp goes up to 86.5 C with the fan speed fixed at 70% (@745Mhz/1000Mhz). The strange thing is that these cards have a very unusual fan speed profile. For example, when I game under Windows, it is very quiet until it gets to 93 degrees, then the fan speeds up until it cools down to 88-87 C and it becomes silent again. The same cycle repeats again and again. This is the default behavior of the card! I have overclocked the card just 20Mhz on the core without voltage adjustment. Let me tell you something, the card has included an overvolt tool which overclocks it up to 30% officially! WOW…What would be the temp of mine with 30% overclock?! maybe 95 degrees at 100% fan speed!
Considering that XFX guys knew what they were doing (I hope so), the 80-ish or even low 90-ish temps are normal for these cards. The gpu core will throttle at 100 degrees (or higher, IDK exactly) and the VRM temperature which is even hotter than the gpu core will only throttle if it reaches 125 degrees for these cards. Thus, I think that there is no need to worry. For the hotter gpu Just set the fan to a fixed tolerable speed and let it mine. Of course the lower temperature the better. But the thing that is acceptable is that constant mining will shorten its life. Who knows… maybe yours will die after 5 or say 3 years…mine after 6 years!.. Anyway, you bought them to mine with them, didn’t you? Furthermore, where will you be after 3 years? Even if it did not die, it would become so outdated the you will have to switch to another generation. I have 5 healthy gpus: Geforce MX 440, Geforce 6600, Geforce 9600GT, 5850 and 5970. None of them died and I just switched to the higher one every 3 years. The first three cards are eating dust at the corner…
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Have you checked all 3 voltage options in afterburner, my voltages always reset unless i have all 3 set in afterburner. You are either using voltage locked cards or afterburner cant change the voltages. I found that my sapphire cards will undervolt using sapphire trixx but not using msi afterburner. You could try to use a different OC utility to modify fan control and voltage. You should also set a custom fan curve for your cards and not let the stock controller do it.
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[quote]The strange thing is that these cards have a very unusual fan speed profile. For example, when I game under Windows, it is very quiet until it gets to 93 degrees, then the fan speeds up until it cools down to 88-87 C and it becomes silent again. The same cycle repeats again and again.[/quote]
It has little to do with fan speed settings in the card’s BIOS. AMD drivers are fucked up. They do what they want with the fan until the card gets bricked due to frequent temperature cycles. After all, that’s the point: you go out and buy another card. Run the fan at fixed speed or allow more intelligent software to control it (bfgminer/cgminer, afterburner, etc.).
[quote]I have overclocked the card just 20Mhz on the core without voltage adjustment. Let me tell you something, the card has included an overvolt tool which overclocks it up to 30% officially! WOW…What would be the temp of mine with 30% overclock?! maybe 95 degrees at 100% fan speed![/quote]
There is no way to overclock it for 30% with reference cooling. Accelero Xtreme 5970 isn’t much better, though quieter. Water cooling is the way to go.
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sure about that accellere statement?
i have two arctic cooling accellero 7970 edition.temp vent from 85 to 50! on card. amazing cooling solution in my opinion.
however 7970 is not a dual gpu card. -
Thanks for the reply’s,
I feel re-assured knowing that this is normal behaviour for these cards. I want to expand my mining capabilities and don’t personally see the point in buying 7950’s or 7970’s when my 5970’s hash at the same, if not better rates. I know they are essentially 2 GPU’s in one, and might use less power, but 7950’s and 7970’s cost a lot more…
I will try the Trix software and see if that makes a difference. Hopefully the temps will drop here in the UK which will help. My cards will fluctuate 7-8 degrees. I’m sure in a few months when its snowing(or next week knowing the UK weather) it will be nice and cold in my mining room.
Cheers
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If you’re really getting that much hashrate out of those cards:
- bravo!
- more power to ya! :) feel free to contribute some of your settings
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[quote name=“svennand” post=“22875” timestamp=“1374648973”]
sure about that accellere statement?
i have two arctic cooling accellero 7970 edition.temp vent from 85 to 50! on card. amazing cooling solution in my opinion.
however 7970 is not a dual gpu card.
[/quote]Put those two into a single computer case and see them choking with hot air. Put two reference HD7970 and have no problems except noise. BTW, Arctic Cooling uses crappy sleeve bearing fans which die in a year or two of full time service.
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I have to say that water is the way to go… if you can afford it. i have water on my gaming rig that runs a single gtx580 (nVidia ftw when it comes to gaming - oddly never thought of running the 20x 7970’s on a game :-\ ) with an idle temp of 37c (ambient is 30 atm) and 100% load with furmark peaks at 52c.
The problem is that the setup cost me ~£250 (have the i7 3930k OC’d to 4.2GHz under water too). Now very few ATI cards run reference design so the waterblocks don’t fit and in anycase, at around £100 per card for water on top of the pumps, reservoirs, rads, piping, clamps, water, etc. It just aint sensible for mining rigs. Accellero is more sensible.
If anyone wants to pursuade EK to make some Gigabyte 7970 OC blocks let me know. ;)
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Save yourself some time and money, buy an aquarium, and dump all the hardware in the tank topped off with mineral oil, pump and radiator. Done.
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Asetek produces nice closed loop water cooling solutions. They sell many of them to Corsair, Thermaltake and Arctic Cooling. Accelero Hybrid 7970 is a good thing to have.
