I ran the Nvidia smoke demo for two hours as a test.

Room temperature is 21.5c. It's a sunny day here but the PC is in a well ventilated, shady room. The radiator sits in clear air as pictured earlier in the thread.

The 8800GTS 640mb card clock speeds are still at Core 648mhz/ Shader 1620mhz/ Memory 1000mhz.

After 1 hour of the Nvidia smoke demo the card temperatures had risen to core 53c/ card ambient 43c.

After 2 hours the card temperatures rose to core 54c/ card ambient 45c.

I then stopped the test.


8800GTS 640mb load temperatures 2 hours of Nvidia Smoke Demo

When looking at idle temperatures it takes a lot longer for the passive watercooling to drop back down to idle again.

You need to give it a good two hours of idling after a benchmark before the card will return to its actual idle temperature.

You have to give the whole room a chance to cool down too. After stopping that Nvidia smoke benchmark the room temperature half an hour later has risen by 0.2c.

That's probably one of the best reasons for changing the 2D clocks: It will keep your room a bit cooler in summer as the card puts out less heat!

What room temperature did you do the test at? With passive cooling temperatures are massively affected by the ambient room temperature.

Because it's the first time I'm using watercooling, I went the cautious way (even more so then I normally do).

I first filled the reserator and quickly found out that you have to push it sideways a lot (as it says in the manual) in order to get the air out. Pushed it both ways, about 20° angle. Then I connected the waterblock to it, some gurgling which soon stopped.
I drained the system (only used distilled water) and then filled it with mix of anti corrosion and distilled water.

The original TIM has been cleaned with Arctclean 1+2, then Arctic ceramique was used.

I don't have a digital thermometer here, room temperature is probably around 22 °C but it's humid. Wearing a t-shirt and ceiling fan is on low.

And I set up Rivatuner so 2D clocks are now... not? enabled.
I just checked, maybe it's a glitch, but at startup Rivatuner sets 3D clock speeds. After selecting 2D clocks they all dropped down though:
Core ROP: 576 -> 288 MHz
Core shader: 1350 -> 675 MHz
Memory: 900 -> 450 MHz

Im too wimpy atm to flash the BIOS.

After enabling 2D clocks, temps dropped from 52/42 °C to 49/40 °C.

Without having an 8800GTX here to compare I can't really say if those are good temperatures are not.

My 8800GTS 640mb idles at somewhere between 37c and 39c depending on room temperature.

Did you do the internal mod on the reserator 2 reservoir in the end?

When the card is fully loaded how hot do the radiator and the black metal fins get? If all the heat is being transferred properly I'd expect them to be baking hot.

Have you tightened the thumbscrews holding the waterblock on right down? I made sure that the four by the GPU core in particular were absolutely as tight as they'd go.

Have you got any tight bends in the cabling? Did you run the cables out through a PCI slot? If there are any kinks it could affect the amount of flow hurting performance.

I also get the feeling that the fluid seperating out may have improved performance a bit also.

It's only the fluid at the bottom of the reserator 2 that circulates.

Have a look at this pic where you can see how much the fluid colour in the tubing has changed after a little over a month!




Zalman Reserator 2 fluid changes after 1 month

No, I didn't do the internal mod (too eager to install things, you know how it goes), maybe I should have. I'm guessing you did this mod...? If so, can you say how you did this?

I haven't fully tightened the screws, but close to it. The manual stated overfastening the screws would "screw" up things, and I thought it would be better to be safe then sorry. The nuts are not fully threaded though, the unthreaded part would act like a natural strut. I will try to fasten them to the unthreaded parts.

It might be possible that the amount of TIM is not enough. I took the waterblock off to see how the TIM was devided, a large part was making good contact, some wasn't though. I guess this is normal with blocks like these and a large heatsink spreader.

No tight bends, and because of it the tubing is a little bit longer then needed (about 60 cm both ways). The tubes run through the PCI slot. I will try to take some pics.

I haven't done the mod on my Reserator 2 as it means draining the loop.

It's on the to-do list for when I replace the fluid in 5-6 months time.

I'd have thought you could get good contact across the entire GPU core heatspreader area.

You can with the stock cooler so it should be possible with the Zalman too.

Did you do part turns around the four thumbscrews by the GPU core in turn to make sure they were tightening down equally?

To be on the safe side those four need to be as tight as you can get them by hand.

It's the other thumbscrews that maybe don't need to be quite as tight. On my card tightening the ones by the VRMs looked to be starting to bend the card a bit.

This is how the tubing looks:






You might be correct, I just turned all screws half a turn each, in an "X" pattern (which turns out to be quite complex with 9 screws but I handled it nicely).
Like you said, it's maybe better to do this only with the 4 screws near the GPU, then tightening the other screws, but not all the way down, to prevent the waterblock to be less then flush with the GPU.
[after reading your complete reply, this is what you already suggested
I'm in a typing mood]

Increased pressure is quite important for a good thermal contact.

The good thing about these large heatspreaders is that you'd have to do something spectacular to crack the core.

Did you do the penny mod on your Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme CPU cooler?

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... 499&page=2

When I assembled my Reserator 2 I used JCS 10mm band 9.5mm - 12mm hose clips rather than the included clips.

I bought them from www.stagonset.co.uk as they did small orders.


JCS 10mm band 9.5mm - 12mm hose clips

I put the hose clips on both ends of the tubing: at the waterblock connection but also on the plastic quick release connectors.

They tighten down a lot tighter using the screwdriver fitting reducing the chance of leaks.

Wow... that penny mod looks eXtreme...

I didn't even tighten my screws all the way up, the motherboard started to bend too much (it was hard to get the RAM in, so I losened the screws a bit).

With the temps I have it's not necessary either, with a 600 RPM fan I get an idle 30+ and load 40+ °C (with my old CPU I was happy with low 60's at load). If it were needed, I'd run the fan even lower. Hard disks are now the noise makers (2x Samsung Spinpoint T 321KJ). Suspending them doesn't seem to work, even at idle... pity.

Did tightening the thumb screws improve your graphics card temperatures?

For the hard drives you should only need one in the PC for the operating system.

I'd take any other drives out and put them in a NAS box such as this fanless Qnap TS-109 Pro:

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=9344&page=1

It has a gigabit NIC built in, runs Linux to give you plenty of configuration options and you can put it somewhere a long way away from your desk connected through the LAN.

Again, very sound advice! What a difference...

I loosened all the screws a bit, tightened the four screws above the core as tight as I could, and tightened the others just a bit, still on spring load.

With low 2D clocks, idle after 3 hours, results are now:
45 / 39 °C (core / ambient).

After over 1 hour and 15 mins of running the Smoke demo, results are:
64 / 53 °C (core / ambient).

Tightening the block made a huge impact on the core temperature (12 °C lower), ambient was no dramatic change (2 °C lower). The block was clearly not seated flush with the GPU before.
Still, my 8800 GTX results are approximately 10 °C above your overclocked 8800 GTS (clocks higher then the 8800 GTX), but I'm very glad with these results!

So, with stock clocks, the temperatures at load with a Reserator 2 are slightly above idle temps with the stock fan cooler


I set my drives up so that C: is quite small, the other partition contains large files (movies, music, pictures).
The other drives contain all programs, games and all that is related to it.
Will have to find a soultion to quiet this, but I still have a lot to install and tweaks to do


[I edited the post on the former page with the correct results]

That's a decent improvement.

The 8800GTX is faster clock for clock than the 8800GTS. I guess it must be significantly hotter too despite using the same GPU.

I have to admit I was expecting the 8800GTS at core 648mhz to be hotter than a 8800GTX at core 575mhz but there you go.

How hot does the Reserator 2 get when the core is at 64c? That's probably the best test of whether heat is transferring properly.

Swapping the thermal paste for Arctic Cooling MX-1 (or the new Arctic Cooling MX-2) is supposed to drop temperatures a few degrees also.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... p?t=135359

My PC is assembled with Arctic Silver 5 at the moment. It's another thing on the to-do list.

A hard drive enclosure goes a long way towards getting rid of idle "white noise" from the hard drive. Suspending the drive seems to be better at reducing the noise of hard drive seeks.

For the hard drive Solid State Drives look like they'll be a reasonable option soon. £300 to get the PC a bit quieter isn't too bad really...

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/0 ... te_drive/1

.

It's not just the clocks, the GTS uses 96 unified shaders, the GTX has 128 shader processors. These will undoubtedly contribute to the extra heat dissipated.

The reserator does feel a little bit warmer then ambient, but by no means too hot too hold. Still slightly above ambient (approx. 10 °C max I think).

32GB drives now? They made a few fair leaps from a while ago. Still worried about reliability, price somewhat, but seems perfect for a silent PC.

That extra power connector on the 8800GTX must be doing something.

Overclocking the 8800GTS to 648mhz core still ends up with a card that's a bit slower than the stock 8800GTX.

You can get mass produced 64gb retail solid state drives but they're properly expensive.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/2 ... roduction/

It's going to be something to buy in 2008 probably when the prices come down to reasonable levels.

My card seems to be running very hot in the following sytem:

P180 with 5 x Nexus real silent 120mm
E6600 @ 3Ghz (stock voltage) w/Scythe Ninja
2 gig Corsair PC26400 @ PC25300 speed (1:1)
2x WD 500gb in Smart Drives cases
evga 8800 gts 640 mb (stock)

It's idling at 68c right now but it was at 78c yesterday when it was hot (relatively) out here in Los Angeles - 78f in my room.

I have a shroud on it to exhaust more air.

I was thinking of replacing the TIM, but can the ram thermal pads be re-used or do i need to replace these when i remove the cooler.

Thanks for any help.

You can (and probably should) re-use the white pads that come with the stock cooler.

If you were going to replace them you'd need to get some thick thermal pads to fill the gap between the RAM and the graphics card cooler.

It's the thermal paste on the core that's the real issue with the stock GF8800 heatsinks.

Cleaning that off and using a thin layer of quality thermal paste should drop the graphics card temperature by 5c or so.

Try taking the side of the case off as a test also. If you get a big drop in graphics card temperature from that then improving airflow over the card would be worth doing.

I have the same problem, I idle at 73c, (load is only 78c), and when I take the side panel off, my temps go to 61c idle and 69c load. I replaced the thermal paste on the core with Artic Silver 5 and it dropped the temps 4c to the above temps, so they were even worse before. I was wondering what I can do to put the temps down. I seperated the CPU and VGA card, and I have a yateloon running at 1250rpm in the mid chamber blowing right on the 8800gts. I really have no idea what to do, I mean, are the temps ok, I mean the high temps aren't damaging anything...

The 8800 series can withstand a lot of heat, about 80 °C (give or take a few) is normal when loaded (it will hold ground at even higher temperatures then that). An idle of 73 seems a bit high, the 8800 GTX with stock cooling only got to 60 °C idle in my case.

From the temps with side panel removed, it would suggest airflow is a bit restricted? With a stock 8800, maybe the "fan duct mod" would improve things a bit (see page 1 of this thread, a little above halfway through).

Only a part of the heat will dissipate through the rear bracket gaps (in stock setup), the rest will be put out inside the case. With a restricted/low airflow case, the higher temps exhausted from the 8800 back into the case will not improve things: it will try to cool the card with the heated up air it just exhausted.

The temps are OK though, no need to really worry.

The card probably won't break at those sort of temperatures.

If it's a hot summer day you have to expect the PC to run fairly hot.

During the winter your temperatures should be far lower. If it doesn't overheat in summer you can normally expect it to work well for the rest of the year.

Have you tried underclocking the card for 2D mode? Doing it through the graphics card BIOS is best but software underclocking will drop your idle temperatures a few degrees too.

With the Antec P180 case have you tried removing the PCI blanking plates beneath the card? Although the Antec P180 PCI blanking plates have holes in them you'll still get better airflow removing the blanking plates altogether.

Ya, im gonna make a duct for the hot air from the vent holes to go out the back, and not out the back of the case. I am also going to move the fan closer to the 8800 in hopes of blowing cold air directly on it. Thanks for the advice.

I have tried the duct, but removed it to replace the TIM. I got no temp drops with AS5, maybe even a bit worse?? Hard to tell with fluctuating ambient. Load with Stalker went up to something like 93c!!. Idle is around 78c with 79f ambient. I have a fan blowing right on it. Maybe the card can take more than 80c, since the fan doesn't even ramp up until the card hits 83c or so?

Well, maybe i will take off the pci slot panels and/or put the duct back on.

Could it be that there is not enough TIM? It seemed there was quite a bit in there before i replaced it with a thin layer of AS5??

Thanks for the input.

78 °C idle seems a bit hot...

When applying AS5, don't use the "grain size" as suggested by Arctic Silver, which is meant for CPU contact.

After removing the stock cooler of the 8800 GTX I saw how messy it can be... They used a lot of TIM. You don't need that much TIM, I think I didn't even do a really good job (perhaps I still used too much TIM, spreading the Arctic Céramique with a plastic card, covering all the heatspreader with a thin layer).

After applying the TIM and mounting the cooler, remove it again to see where it makes contact. The "unaffected" area made no contact, whereas the affected area (making good contact) will show some mountain/quilted like spikes.
This might be awkward, because I noticed it might be hard to remove a just pressed cooler on a card, the thermal pads and TIM will make the cooler stick to the card. However it is the best way to check if you dind't use enough TIM (it will not really tell you if you used too much though).

Well after doing 2 things....

Put a a metal vent underneath the 8800gts to catch hot air and force it outside the case
Adding a second fan to that compartment blowing right on the 8800gts.

...My idle temps droped from 73c to 68c. Ya, 5c drop, I think thats pretty good. Its obvious it just needed more airflow. My load know is 77c, which is pretty good. Another thing is that the RPM on the 8800gts fan went down, meaning the temp dropped more, so the fan could slow down.

So adding a 2nd case fan and a duct or vent helped alot. It quieted my comp down and lowered the temps quite a bit.

Thanks for the help.

I replaced TIM again and it was not touching all the surface before. Idle is at 64c with side open, 80c on load. Much better than before (:

If you were really unlucky you could have ended up with a 8800GTS card that idles at 108c.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1216425

If it's that hot there's got to be something wrong with it though.

Well for one thing, in that case, since hot air rises, it all rose and was sucked in by 8800gts's fan, so cooling a already hot card with hot air, not a good idea.

I am running this beast in a Antec Fusion case. Since it takes 2 PCI slots, the fan side of the video card is super close to the side of the case. Heat is trapped in the area and my temps are not too good. 70 idle, 85 load

On the side of the card, there are a few vent slits where heat is expelled out. From reading the advice in this thread, I made a ghetto cardboard shroud where heat can flow out to the back of the case. I tried this and it helped cooled temps lower by aprox 5C. This still gave me load temps in the low 80C

Other than that I don't know what else to do. This mofo card is a beast for this mATX case. It was just never ment to be. If anyone have any suggestions to lower my temps, i'd appreciate it. And no, I do not want to buy a HR-03 aftermarket cooler.

If those are your graphics card temperatures, what's the problem?

I'd probably try cutting a hole in the top of the Antec fusion case just above the graphics card.

If you cover it with black mesh it won't be noticeable but should reduce the amount of internal heat buildup caused by the graphics card.

The other one to try would be cutting a hole in the side of the case directly facing the intake fan of the 8800GTS card.

There are some really good mods of Shuttle cases where people have done that so the graphics card gets fresh air from outside the case.

70C idle & 85C load for a 8800GTS is pretty bad brother.
I understand that these cards can take 90-100, but I'd like to run cooler and play it safe.

No problem with having them run that hot. I had the same temps, just added a shroud and turned up the fan blowing over it and my temps dropped 10 degrees. And the fan slowed down (quieter), but the temps arent a problem, seriously.