this allot of fans isn't always good, i had one on top of the case and when i removed it it actually dropped my cpu temp by 7 - 9C.. on cpu not cpu cores (from 34-36 to 25-27C).
There is a difference in furmark between ATI and Nvidia. And the 30C buffer, I expect, is caused by low utilization.
Man, I really do appreciate your viewpoint, since you've got the same card, and you've obviously experienced the same thing... at least, I think so. So, you've had this happen to you, where the card starts making this sporadic "leaf-blower" sort of noise? That really freaked me when it happened, altho it's only happened on that one occasion when the card got up over 100 degrees Celsius. Your card didn't die? I guess not. Neither did mine, but now I don't trust it and think I probably should get a different card, like the ATI 5870, or at least exchange this one for another GTX470. Damn it, this is the last thing I wanted to have to be f*cking around with, and worrying about, after just buying a new video card. If the noise was "normal" and just the card trying to defend itself, then I can live with that, and I'll set the damn fan up to 75% and leave it there all the time. EVGA has a lifetime warranty, so maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. Let me know what you think, though. And, thank you!
So reading ur first post and i see that you reported a IDLE temp of 60c !?! Are you absoluty serious about that ? As said before download Afterburner and just watch ur temp/fanspeed when sitting at the desktop and report back to me.
it seems the sweet spot for temps and noise is just under 80%fan that way u keep under 80c load as well
Yikes. Your idea of a sweet spot is way different than mine. 70% was far too loud for me after having come from 5770s which you could never hear, even when overclocked.
Sorry, please let me clarify. Five minutes after the temperature soared to 102 degrees Celsius and I quit playing Borderlands, the temperature had gone back down to 60 degrees Celsius. The card has been "idling" (just desktop and internet browsing) at around 35 degrees Celsius. What I'm trying to understand at this point is whether I should RMA the card after that one episode where it got above boiling and went into that weird "leaf-blowing" behavior. Point well-taken about using Afterburner and reversing the fan direction on the Antec side door 120mm fan. Thank you!
It sounds to me like the card itself is fine. Personally, instead of setting it at 75% constantly, I would use a custom fan curve in afterburner to let it be quiet during light load and ramp up as the temp increases, but ramp up on your schedule. But I think it's possible that your card has maybe less than optimal contact between the sink and the GPU. It never should have reached 102, that's weird.
When i was on air i did the same thing! 1c increase would mean a 1% fan speed increase. With SLI while gaming (Crysis) temps would rise to about 82c but with a fan speed of 83% that was waay to loud for me ... Just finish'd my WC setup a dedicated loop for my GTX's and its been sitting at 34/33c while idle .. But ontopic. Nofool i think your card is good but what IplayNaked said maybe true ... or ur fan isnt ramping up as it should. Run furmark in a windowed mode and run Afterburner next to it ... see when ur fan start ramping up and at what levels its staying ..
yeah, the factory auto fan profile really sucks, it will let your card go above 90 easily before putting the fan on super overdrive to try to compensate for late cooling. set a custom profile with afterburner, to at least 1c to 1%, that should help it cool a lot more efficiently. i now set my fan profile to 1c to 1% +10% due to overvolting and overclocking. (like fan is always 10 higher than whatever temperature it is). and idling @ 60, that sounds normal to me..... if you have a dual monitor setup, that's a known "issue" for the fermi's, i just found that out the other day too. single monitor setup idle will down throttle to 50mhz. dual monitor setup idle will only down throttle to 405mhz. i tested this by disabling 1 monitor in nvidia control panel the temperature difference during idle is roughly 10c to 15c lower while fan running 10%~15% slower.
I really appreciate your viewpoints and opinions! Thank you for helping me put this in a correct perspective. I have carefully (and manually) controlled the fan situation, and increased the speed of the case fans on my Antec 900 case also. I'm going to keep the GTX470, mostly because of EVGA's lifetime warranty, but I do wish that there had been some kind of warning to customers about the necessity to radically increase the card's fan speed from "stock". I've continued to play "Borderlands" really hard, and I've manually moved the fan speed to 71%. After nearly an hour of gameplay, this yields a videocard temperature of about 68 degrees Celsius. Oh, I'll just mention -- if you have some screen tearing in Borderlands, try forcing Vertical Sync to "on". I don't think it affects temperature, but it makes the game better to play. Again, thanks to all of you... I've always been able to count on Guru3D colleagues.
