PC Gamers....

[CJ]

yeah Im going to pull it apart tonight and see how good the impressions are on the thermal pads. I just hope I have enough IC Diamond to repaste.

If its not contacting very well I may try stacking the thermal pads from the stock cooler on the ones on there now. I read about someone doing that on a watercooling setup and it helped alot.

If you really want to solve the problem, you might need to cut the bottom of the sink and allow copper chip sinks to fit on top of those. I have a ton of the swiftechs laying around. They work very well.

[roliath]

Or get thicker thermal tape, that might be the easiest but not the best solution.

[Lason]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, Ill see what I figure out tonight. I just checked out kitguru again because they had another review of these coolers and they replaced the stock fans with bigger 140mm fans to further help out. I saw on one of their screenshots hitting 112*.

[roliath]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, Ill see what I figure out tonight. I just checked out kitguru again because they had another review of these coolers and they replaced the stock fans with bigger 140mm fans to further help out. I saw on one of their screenshots hitting 112*.

Damn that's hot, i'll have to double check mine since I added the third card but I do remember under load they sat around 70ish degree's. Your's will naturally be higher since those vregs' are doing the work for two cards.

What was your score in Unigine? Primarily the second run, the first one run is always discarded. (at stock settings @ 1080p.)

[roliath]

i'm a dope. sorry

[Lason]

I came home, pulled both cards out and checked the screws on the heatsink and they were a bit loose on the one that was overheating. I checked them all and Ill be damned if I didnt strip out one of the screws on the other card! Still dont know how Im going to fix that, I went to frys and got longer screws but there are no threads left. Little 2x56 screw too.

So now Im running on one card while I figure out what to do.

[roliath]

ouch!!!!

perhaps ring up arctic and see about getting a new set of screws?

[Lason]

Naaa its not the screws, the heatsink reuses the factory screws from the 6990, the aluminum heatsink stripped out, I think the only thing I can do is tap it to the next size and I think that is a 4-40. Ill go by the hobbyshop tomorrow and pick up a tap and screws.

Good news is the original card's Vreg temp that was overheating is now running 75-80* during benchmarks.

[Lason]

OK picked up the 4-40 tap and some screw and put the heatsink back together hopefully for the last time and ran a benchmark, looks MUCH better now. Im so tired of pulling those cards out!

[roliath]

What was your unigine score? And glad to hear you got it sorted out, although I'd be afraid to jack something up by tapping it so more power to you!

[Lason]

Ran the Going hunting benchmark and got average fps of 83.203. Min fps was 56 and high was 104.

Ill run Heaven11 again in a bit. Here are the settings I used in BF3.

[roliath]

Ran the Going hunting benchmark and got average fps of 83.203. Min fps was 56 and high was 104.

Ill run Heaven11 again in a bit. Here are the settings I used in BF3.

Damn BF3 scales nicely at that res.

edit: I get about the same, 63/130 82avg on my eyefinity setup no msaa, fxaa @ high, no motion blur.

[Lason]

I tried taking a vid of the BF3 benchmark but fraps knocked the FPS from 90-100 to 44!! So I just benchmarked it and loaded it to spreadsheet.

Here is Heaven benchmarks. I was having issues finishing the benchmark so I turned the clocks down on the cards and memory. 925mhz on the gpu and 1300mhz on the memory. I ran it at 1920x1080 and turned tessalation off.

[roliath]

I tried taking a vid of the BF3 benchmark but fraps knocked the FPS from 90-100 to 44!! So I just benchmarked it and loaded it to spreadsheet.

Here is Heaven benchmarks. I was having issues finishing the benchmark so I turned the clocks down on the cards and memory. 925mhz on the gpu and 1300mhz on the memory. I ran it at 1920x1080 and turned tessalation off.

I was like HOLY FUCK, that's a bad ass score; than noticed tessellation was off !

And yeah fraps will knock it down all the time, also depends on what drive its saving the movie to.

How's the sound compared to the stock Heatsinks on the GPU's and the new ones?


edit: I wish the 6970's had as many DP ports as those 6990s.

[Lason]

The sound of the fans vs the reference fans? I run the new ones at 100% full time and I hear the Noctua before I hear the Arctic coolers. I probably shouldnt run them like that but they are so damn quiet.