Upgrade to Liquid

Allo, first post on this forum, been lurking quite a while though.

Finally it's bugged me enough to want help, as I'm not sure where to turn for this.

Right now I have 2 9800GTX+'s in SLi in my rig, along with a Q6600 on an MSI P7N SLI Platinum. I love this system to death, but dear god do the GPUs run hot.

Right now, running FFXI at highest settings (minimized), it's sitting at 64C. I'd love to knock them down a bit, and water cooling seems to be the best option, but I have no idea where to even start.

I'm not sure if these cards even support a cooling block (especially since it's in SLI mode). Right now there's an EVGA cooler on them (stock), and it's absolutely worthless. Not only are the cards smoking hot, but my room is the hottest room in the house. I'm not liking it at all on 90F days, lol.

Even during the winter my room gets toasty enough that I open the window to let some cold air in.

I guess my real question is, what am I best off doing? I was looking at the Koolance Exos-2.5. Supposedly it cools 1000W worth of heat. I'm not sure if this is overkill, as I plan to upgrade one day (hopefully to i7, GTX2xxx's)

Well, I hope this wasn't too little/much information, I'm just seriously confused.

Also, so I don't forget once that is all cleared up.

How should I go about the route to adequately cool all the neccessary components? (Doesn't need to be answered right away, just for my own reference, but if someone wants to answer feel free lol).

Thanks again =)

KtotheFC said:

Right now, running FFXI at highest settings (minimized), it's sitting at 64C.

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64C isn't hot at all. Newer Nvidia cards will run upward of 95C before you run into any real problems.

My GTX285 peaks at about 85C-86C and it is still going fine.

How hot do they get when they are fully loaded?

Right now they're on auto, 51% fan speed, 61C & 62C

Oh I do apologise, only after reading you post again did I see that you are new here so welcome to Vista Forums, I hope you enjoy your time here.

KtotheFC said:

Right now they're on auto, 51% fan speed, 61C & 62C

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You are definitely safe at those temperatures. The fans will increase in RPM when the GPU is getting hotter so I wouldn't worry about it.

Thanks for the welcome =)

Fully loaded, I haven't tested in a while, I never really see them hit 70C or so during normal gaming though.

I usually leave them on at 100% speed, but they throw out some massive heat into my room so I've been trying to keep it lower lol.

As I said, you are safe well into the 80s and even 90s with those GPUs.

Just leave the auto fan controller to do its work, it will make gaming better because you won't have the fans producing so much noise and your room shouldn't heat up as fast.

I find that with my GTX285 the fan doesn't move from 40% until 65-70C and I can only hear the fan when the GPU hits 80C+ (and it only gets that hot in FurMark).

According to Nvidia the 9800GTX+ have a max temp of 105C, the card would probably start throttling in the mid to late 90s but I am yet to see any of my GPUs even go past 86C.

Hello KtotheFC,
I had two BFG 8800 ultra's in SLI, that ran at 76.C under load, and i always thought that was good.