Which fan design do you prefer?

sure. It really depends on how much better the 3rd party coolers perform. They weren't as efficient in the 7xx series, because those chips ran a fair bit hotter than these new maxwells. Trust me when I say this, a 970/980 with a nice 3rd party cooler will run so cool, I maxed mine out at 62C, that is while benching with an overclocked card. That's how good these coolers perform on these cores.

Not sure exactly how much hotter a reference blower would be, but I'm pretty sure in the mid 70s. So here the 3rd party cooler would make more sense.

 

H2O my cards never go over 52C and are within 2C of each other at all times and this is with just one pump. Granted this cost a lot more than air cooling but it is cooler and quieter.

 

umm ok i'll correct myself 80c
metro last light built in benchmark settings
DSR single screen non sli mode : Resolution: 1810 x 1448; DirectX: DirectX 11; Quality: Very High; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Advanced PhysX: Enabled; Tesselation: High; Motion Blur: Normal; SSAA: ON

high settings to max the card for max thermal realish time test. don't think the gpu load dropped below 93% the whole test

 

I had major heat issues with sli cards especially the top one, it was just a matter of finding the right case went through a few cases till I found the right one, I have settled with the Thermaltake Core V71 with 4x 200mm fans, 2x120mm intake on the bottom 1x140mm rear out, 2x200mm front intake, 2x140mm H110 top out and 2x200mm top out, temps are now very good.

 

hmm my case has very good venting but I could add another case fan to bring it down a bit, but I like how quiet it is now I've removed the side fans as well... had enuff of the old r9 290x's don't want that sound back again lol

 

And there u have it, i also have a good case, cooler master haf x atm no sli-setup for now, but metro last light is a good stresser for benchmarking, most cards if its not all wil reach over 75c for sure, on max settings, with third party cooler also.

 

I also could improve air flow in my case by swapping out the 2 stock 140mm intake fans to either 3 120s or 2 different 140s. Like 2 aluminium bladed 140s.

 

The sound does not bother me much, I use fan controllers so can turn them down or off if need be.

 

Bah. I had reference GTX 680 and Palit cheapo blower type GTX 680 in SLI and the top card reached 83c. I'm sure that would have not been the case with custom coolers. My current card is so cool that it is difficult to even hit 60c, adding another wouldn't destroy the cooling completely.

 

Voted for the custom air dumpers.

Had sli twinfrozr iv in this case before, top card never went over 68c, 60-2 for the bottom with a custom fan profile. I liked the twinfrozr better than the ACX on this card... msi have a great design.

 

'Single, Dual or Triple fan design with hot air ejected inside the PC case'

Purely to have as little sound from it as possible.
I have a big tower with 6 fancontroled fans running very low speed taking care of the airflow.
I have tryed everything other than this, all it did was costing me a lot of money and did'nt last very long.

 

yea im surprised it hit 79-80c (80% fan speed can barley hear it though) but im happy with that, got to be better than 95c. I use metro last light because it will load your cards to the max and keep gpu's loaded, if you have all setting maxed out want to really test ya gpu cooling. other games like arma 3 max gpu hit is 65-68 c but like I said I wanted to test how hot they can get, hence using metro Last Light in game benchmark with DSR blah blah blah settings.

 

I like double and triple fan designs. Even a single fan on the smaller cards.

To me, the main thing is the squirrel cage design is much more difficult to clean both the heatsink and the fan blades.

On a side note, from working in air conditioning and doing air balancing, I question the proper airflow across the heat-sink with the exhaust out the back type. It's uneven. With dual and triple fans, the heat dissipation should be more evenly distributed to cool the GPU. Nearly any worthwhile case can handle the additional heat-load. If you're into extreme overclocking (CPU) where a few degrees of ambient case GPU heat causes an issue, I would think water cooling or more reasonable settings would be prudent.

These new 9 series seem to be taking much of the heat out of the equation anyways. Cards run cooler and the lighter load on the PSU should make that run cooler (than with previous GPU generations) as well.

 

Yeah the benchmark is mental, before u know it reaches 80c
Hell even my gtx690 reach that temps in about 2 min crazy stuff
I still wish to upgrade to maxwel, so hard not to do it, but then again it is

Funny thing is about the benchmark is that vsync is off by default ,so u have unlimited frames to render, but when u just play the game that have a vsync option, then it wil cap your monitors refresh rate to your fps, so in theoretically that also means u have lower temps then with vsync off.

 

This. On these modern Maxwells, 3rd party all the way.

 

this one, short card. as long as its short and compact, whether the air is exhausted or dumped in case

 

Bit of both, but mainly dumps inside the case.

 

Prefer non reference coolers for better cooling and overclocking

 

yeah I guess if you use vsync then it should run cooler but with 3 monitors running even with sli 970s if the games settings max out the cards they not always at 60fps, can in some parts stick around 35fps then other parts might be 57-80fps, so the cards will always run hotter unless the game can not max them out. even 60fps on 3 monitors will kick the cr!p out of most setups game depending.

its no good testing a game to see how cool your gfx card runs if the game cant kick the crap out of the card ..

 

I noticed this with my card with using 2 monitors connected to the same card my idle temps are up by around 10C or so from the low 30s to the low 40s and my mem clocks are stuck the 3D clock speeds and I have great airflow since my case was designed to have great air flow.