GFX Cooling Solution's for 2 6800 ULTRA's on my SLi rig..????

HawgsHead

Zardon

Fitting watercooling on two 6800 ultras in such a confined space would be tricky, but its possible. I think your system is plenty fast enough bud ! ive a system here similar to yours (but not overclocked), the XFX 6800 ultras I have are running at around 54 idle and 64 load. well within safety limits and performance is excellent.

HawgsHead

Zardon!I'm surprised!Fast enough???????YOU said that?????.........You sick or something???????Get well soon!

Zardon

Well you see the difference is, im looking at your signature and thinking you actually bought all that stuff ! You have some totally kick ass systems man, I really dont see the need to start putting a dual GFX watersystem into your pc. I mean if you have money to burn and want to play around, sure, but take EXTREME caution when bleeding and run overnight outside the system to ensure you wont get any leaks, that would be one hell of a costly leak. You wont see massive gains with watercooling unless you go for some hardcore stuff (which will be a tight fit with 2GFX so close), temps will drop for sure, but unless you are seeing 80c I wouldnt worry.

HawgsHead

I'm sorry to say that water cooling the GFX cards is out.I called Zalman and the water block's wont fit the SLi rig.....Not enough room.But the tech. did say I could use 2 of there heatsink and fan units.there's enough room for that.He also said I wasnt the 1st person that had called about water cooling a SLi rig with there Resenator system and they were looking at building some" skinny" warterblocks for the GFX cards.

Zardon

Yes UK PR mentioned that as well a few days ago to me, however I dont know how good this will be for overclocking and cooling a 6800ultra. Probably not much better than the heatsink fan combo you get at stock.

CDsDontBurn

Didn't gainward come out w/a waterblock system a few months back specifically for the 6800GT/Ultras running in SLI? If those are still available, i'd call gainward and see if they still have them for sale.

Zardon

Thats an option for him if they still sell them, but personally id have nothing with the name "gainward" near me. Long story

HawgsHead

I have had nothing but BFG's except 1 EVGA that I was very happy with.Whats up with Gainward?

Zardon

Their customer support in Germany, but thats just my findings. Im sure others have more positive comments about gainward.

HawgsHead

I just found out the same thing out about Futuremark{3DMARK05}.For some strange reason when I bring up 3DMARK05 on my SLi rig it locks up the whole machine.I have downloaded three times and it still does the same thing.To fix it I have to un-install my GFX drivers and re-install them.Then the program works fine.I can bring it up and down as many times as I want to.But when it sits for 30 minutes or so,the same thing happens again.....It locks up and I have to do the same thing all over again.I have been tring to get tech. support for 2 weeks......nothing!Any ideas????And yes,I have tried differant GFX drivers.

Zardon

Well I have an SLI rig like yourself (see links in sig), and I found with coolbits installed I got some problems with stability. I reformatted (as I do every month anyway). Just installed the chipset drivers for the mobo, then the 71.84 WHQL set and its working fine again. I dont touch overclocking on the 6800 ultras either, I run them stock, when I tried that I had some problems.

I also dont run two molex into the cards, just one, as I dont overclock the cards, stability is fine, just run the molex into the mobo EZ slot.

HawgsHead

The 2 WORST words in the English language......cancer and reformat!

Zardon

reformatting doesnt bother me, im so used to it now with testing drivers, its second nature, and its the best indication to find out if your problem is hardware or software.

Secret is to have a multi hard drive setup so you have all your drivers, files on another drive to reinstall.

That or use ghost.

Zardon

I mean here is a good example.

I built this rig up, and had previously been using ATI cards, I manually cleaned the registry, and was consistently benching around 21900 in 3dmark03

reformatted and its now consistently 22,100+ http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=3875770

And im not condoning the use of 3dmark or being obsessed by it but it is a hell of a good indication of changes to your system. 200 points for a clean OS (as well as rock solid stability), a decent little increase.

HawgsHead

Our SLi rig's are within 250 points of one another.What are these guys doing that are getting 12000-13000 points on 3DMARK05?VapoCool?I see there FX-55's running at 3.1-3.3 GHz??????

Zardon

yes, more than likely. this FX55 hits 2.9ghz on air, but the core voltage is too high for my liking. Anyway this is a DH testing rig, im not really stressing it hard, light cpu overclocking with stock GFX speeds.

I mean I was playing doom3 ROE today at 1600x1200 4aa 16af on ultra settings with vsync locked to the LCD 60hz, and it sat at 60fps solid all the way through 3 levels!

HawgsHead

Anawer a question for me....Why does the score go down when I run it above 2.7GHz?Thats what I run mine at.

Zardon

What temps is your CPU sitting at? if its thermally throttling it will lower.

itchy5

ya to get 3.2+ on 55s you most likly need vapo, i wanna put one on cascade just for fun eric forgot to bring his 55 up to TXGF his lucky 35 had to do still fun

HawgsHead