Which fan design do you prefer?

Please explain why you chose a particular option.

 

I dont care for hot air ejected inside the case. Good airflow resolve that. Dual-fan GPU was always my pick. Even now i choose Vapor-X solution.

 

I always preferred the custom coolers ever since I had my Chaintech Geforce FX 5700ulta card which had dual fans. My 2nd dual fan card would be my Geforce GTX 560 Ti. Even the custom coolers that even had 1 fan were good such as my Geforce 6800 and GTS 250. But I prefer cards with multiple fans because I really like my card being cool and quiet. Right now I have a Sapphire r9 290 tri-x card that has 3 fans.

 

More Fans = More cooling for everything, VRMs, GPU, VRAM
Airflow taking care of the Heat thats going up from the Card
Big 140mm High RPM gonna suck it out of the Case surely :beam:

 

Reference coolers may expel the hot air out of the case, but they are usually pretty ugly overall. These days they cool better, but in days past they were inferior in almost every way. Also, they were almost always noisier and featured more hum/vibration.

After going non-reference cooling, it to me is better in most ways, even if it doesn't exhaust like a reference cooler. All you need is even mediocre air flow in your case and its a non issue.. plus the coolers in many ways are quieter, run cooler and are less noisy.

 

I think they both good and bad, SLI is best with reference [less heat], and single card purpose is better with custom cooler.

 

Not true. good 3rd party cooling will beat blowers. According to Hilbert's review, a blower 970 hits 78C with single card, 83C with SLI. My 970 tops out at 62C and I'm pretty sure it would run at sub 75C in SLI. That is with an overclock.

Most people who run SLI will have enough fans in their case to deal with the dumped hot air.

pretty much this.

 

Not necessarily true, hilbert tests with an open bench. If you have 1-2 slots free, your temps will always be MUCH hotter than the blowers(atleast the top card will be). 580 SLI Lightnings(twinfrozr coolers) top card was 20c hotter than the bottom card, that was with 2 slots between the cards. I then swapped accelero xtreme coolers(best cooler for GPU core cooling) and my top card was still 20c hotter than the bottom.
The only way the blower fans will be beaten is if there is 4slots or more in spacing. Otherwise, reference coolers will always be better for multi gpu. This was the case for titan sli and my previous 680 sli.

 

Not when the reference cards run 20C hotter than 3rd party cards.

I had 2 slots between my 7950s (both non reference) and my top card ran about 10C hotter. A single reference 7950 would run hotter than my top card, vapor-x.

Someone on here said in another thread they're running 970 sli and the max temp is 65C. I don't think the "reference" 970s can run that cool, even in single gpu setup.

 

Nuff said.

 

beg to differ with reff crossfire 290x's got rid of them due to issues, replaced with 970 g1's in sli max temp gpu 75, case runs cooler and quieter now with less fans .. from my setup tests anyway. the heat that radiated from th reff cooler used to over head my sound card, but in fairness it was the r9 290x's known for being almost thermo nuclear.

 

not a fair comparison, really...

Agent, here's what I was talking about http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4937998&postcount=942

a reference 970, even a single card would easily run over 70C, on it's own. The 3rd party cooling on these bad boys is incredible, the low tdp helps with getting these chips cool.

 

U do know that those AMD cards run hell hotter right ?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-and-290x,3728-6.html

Then can reach 85 or higher under full load if they want.

Then again the 900 series from nvidia are no energie eaters either so thats a good thing.

 

yeea like said rr9 290x not really a good example to use ... but just thought i'd mention it as its not always thee case.

 

Never had SLI myself, but it makes more sense IMO (not on short term usage but long term when the comp is on for X hours on row), to have a decent cooler on the cards as you've mentioned AND coolers near it sucking air OUT of the case rather then in.

This way you might prevent excessive heat build-up over time in a SLI setup.

Then again I haven't really tested it with a real setup, but that seems more sensible to me.

I've gone with this mindset for most of the time for my case airflow though. Buy decent coolers for the parts and then make sure as much heat as possible is expelled from the case. Kept my temps more "stable" over several hours.

 

to stop heat build up over time your case should have good exhaust fan to help off set temp inside case

all I know is cooler and quieter the better

even more so after the crossfire reff r9 290x's I had

 

Bottom card was low 50s while the top card was topping mid 80s, in this case if the top card was reference, temps would easily be 10c less. Accelero xtremes are the best gpu air coolers and granted 580s put ouy more heat, but still. With voltage tuning the top card will be hot, better it be reference in this case.

 

Well that's basically what I'm saying, having another exhaust fan near or just above the GPU's to get the heat out they generate instantly.

Having just 1 exhaust fan might just not be enough.

Also found that alot of 200 mm fans are actually weaker then some of the more powerfull 120 mm fans in case you want more "directed" air.

In case of my Corsair 600T, the default 200 mm was so weak in terms of "directing" air in a focused direction, airflow never kicked in properly.

 

im sure ive seen my 970 g1's top card hit 75c with 3 monitors benching metro last light everything max SSAA and advanced physic's enabled, i'll do a retest and monitor with gpu z

 

this is how I used to cool my pc and now it has less fans runs cooler so it depends on how much noise your willing to put up with ..

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/community/threads/zalman-zm-mfc-3.227997/