After Market GPU cooling ??

jonski

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but it seems more suitable than the graphic forum .

I bought a VTX3D Radeon HD 7870 X-Edition recently and to be fair I am very happy with the performance , It plays BF£ Company Of Heroes 2 and Grid 2 with no problems ................. except ......... My God is that fan loud and my PC is in the living room and I can see the missus looking at me when she is watching TV and I start a game .

So , without spending a fortune and bringing the price up to the same as an XFX , is there any way I could change the cooling to something that brings it down to a dull roar ? . After-market fans that are half decent without costing an arm and a leg ?

marco_polo

Before buying anything, if your load temperatures are pretty good, it might be worth trying some custom fan profiles, to run the cards a little hotter but with lower RPMs.

Any OC software like afterburner etc should have this.

jonski

Temps while running Grid 2 are 76 C

Gumbi

jonski wrote: »

Temps while running Grid 2 are 76 C

Yikes. Poor cooling What's your airflow situation? As in, do you have case fans etc?

tuxy

76 is only slightly higher than average for a 7870. Most of them will be in the low 70s. It's only if you see it getting in to the mid 80s that you should be worried.

You could try vsync on in some games. This will keep frame rate at 60 and reduce load and noise. However demanding game will still have high load

jonski

Gumbi wrote: »

Yikes. Poor cooling What's your airflow situation? As in, do you have case fans etc?

No , cooling is good my xfx 5770 never hit 60 and my cpu at full load only hits 55 , it's a good case with 2 front fans , one side , one top and one back .

I think it's down to poor cooling on the card .

Gumbi

jonski wrote: »

No , cooling is good my xfx 5770 never hit 60 and my cpu at full load only hits 55 , it's a good case with 2 front fans , one side , one top and one back .

I think it's down to poor cooling on the card .

Yeah, that's what I meant, poor cooling on the card. There's basically no thermal headroom. Try undervolting it. Basically reduce the voltage on the card slightly and test for stability each time. If it crashes, it means you need a bit more. Try to find the lowest possible stable voltage.

tuxy

is it the VTX3D Radeon HD 7870 with a single fan?
The cooling on them does look poor, not so bad that it would cause problems but that one fan will have to do a lot of work.

When and were did you buy it?
Some shops have a good return policy for this kind of thing, I know amazon does. You could the buy one with a better solution for a few € more.

marco_polo

Your probably not going to get anything rated for a HD7870 delivered to Ireland for anything under €40 unfortunately.

jonski

marco_polo wrote: »

Your probably not going to get anything rated for a HD7870 delivered to Ireland for anything under €40 unfortunately.

Yeah , this is what I was thinking , I was just hoping that maybe someone on here might have known of another option .

Gumbi

jonski wrote: »

Yeah , this is what I was thinking , I was just hoping that maybe someone on here might have known of another option .

You might get some headroom by undervolting.

uberpixie

http://quietpc.ie/gel-icy-vision

Gelid Solutions Icy Vision Rev.2

€40

Seems to have gotten good reviews, may have to consider getting one for my 6950 :-)

jonski

Thinking thats a bit overkill for what I need , and the €40 makes me think to myself " you should have bought the XFX you cheap git " .

I don't need something for performance , I won't be overclocking or anything , I just need something to take down the noise .

Tea_Bag

after market coolers are normally much better than stock stuff. it might be €40, but it'll sound a lot quieter than even that xfx probably.

marco_polo

The problem is something like the L2 Plus will might physically fit a HD7870, but it is not rated for the sort of heat that card will produce, and looking at the number in this review with a HD7770, i am not at all convinced that it would be able to cool that VTX card effectively even at 100% fan. If it did work it would be pushing it right to it very limits.

Anything that I could recommend, Cooling Accelero TwinTurbo Pro II, Arctic Cooling Accelero Mono Plus, or the Gelid Icy above would all come in at about the same price of 40+.

You could try the L2 (Disclaimer: This is most certainly not a recommendation from me to do so), but if you do get enough paste to reattach the stock cooler in case it doesn't work, and flog it on adverts. But TBH you are probably better off spending 40 on something that definitely work as opposed to 20 on something that might.

At least with a good cooler like the Gelid there would be no reason not to overclock the card to 1150-1200MHz which would give a very nice performance boost and soften the price blow somewhat.

If the other card was the XFX core version with the single fan then the cooling on that is fairl meh on that as well anyway, one of the really whisper quiet HD7870, like yours would be after installing a good cooler, would have been a similar price anyway to the VTX + cooler combo :cool:.

jeffacakeblake

Here I recently bought a new PC with the help of guys on here but I messed up and accidentally bought two different cooling fans.
So I have a brand new thermaltake macho which Ill sell to you for say 25e.
Heres the link

http://www.hardwareversand.de/Intel+AMD/67116/Thermalright+Macho+120.article

tuxy

That's a cpu cooler, he's looking for a gpu cooler. You should have no problem selling it on adverts.ie though.

jeffacakeblake

tuxy wrote: »

That's a cpu cooler, he's looking for a gpu cooler. You should have no problem selling it on adverts.ie though.

Too early brain not at full power yet