So I just put in my second card today, and ran Heaven Benchmark. One card maxxed out at 70 degrees celcius while the other hit 90 degrees celcius. These are the XFX Double Dissipation (947) versions, not overclocked. First of all, is it normal to have one card be so much hotter than the other despite having a 240mm fan blowing directly on them and a 240mm fan sucking out the top? Also, is 90 degrees celcius safe? Or am I really cutting it close here? Should I not be running these in crossfire?
Not too much to worry about. The 290s have a TDP of 95*C before they will throttle down. If you want you can change this by installing MSI Afterburner and setting your own thermal limit and creating a fan profile for both cards to help keep temps down.
90c is quite hot for the top video card. Are you running the stock fan profiles? if so run an aggressive fan profile on the top card at least.
sound about right to me, these cards are like thermal reactors my crossfire 290x's hit 94 although they are/were amd reference cards, sent back today after 7months of black screening with 3 monitor setup but work fine with just 1 monitor. hopefuly the cards wont have the black screen issue if so im sending them straight back in exchange for two nvidia cards. stability is the key sod this black screening lol. :/
I am using a custom fan profile, have it at 100% fan at 65 degrees. So if it hits 95 it'll just stay there by throttling down?
Yes. The default temp target of the cards is 95C. Once this temp is reached the default fan profile will ramp up fan speeds to keep the card at or just under this temp (this is obviously all depending on how stressed the card is). I would open MSI AB and set a temp target of MAX 75C (80C if you can live with that). Your performance may suffer as the cards wont boost clocks up as much. But honestly what would you rather have... two hot cards that perform great but have shorter life or two cards that perform great and last longer? ALSO Make sure you select in MSI AB settings on the first tab at the top, tick "synchronize settings for multiple cards". So that your fan profile will kick in on BOTH cards. How much space is between the two cards? You may also be suffocating the top card.
Ok so this is weird. I put the top card (the 6 month old one) on the bottom and the bottom on the top. Now my Max temp is 86 and it's only 10 degrees higher than the lower one, I get much better performance too. This seems wrong. Now I seem to have another problem. When my video cards heat up now, my southbridge fan ramps up to full speed. The lower video card is right in front of this fan so I'm guessing this is causing a problem. Has anyone ever fried their motherboard with their video cards? Also, how do I lock my temperature in MSI AB? I'm seeing no option for that.
I will have to tell u that, I experienced the same problem with the southbridge also, it goes up to 75 degree while I'm gaming and it made the system crashed and reboot, the motherboard I used is Asus z97A, then I changed to Maximus VII ranger the problem is gone, just don't know why, cause it doesn't seems that ranger have better cooling on SB than Z97A, anyway if ur system doesn't crash then it's all good otherwise there's nothing much u can do but to keep those fans on max while playing games, or go liquid cooling
