Hi so I have an i7 3770K overclocked to 4.2Ghz on air and very stable, may upgrade to 2011-3 later this year, not sure. I have a GTX 670 Windforce x3 that runs well and hovers around 60Celcius, often boosts up to 1110Mhz with no addtional overclocking.

My real query is on my EVGA GTX 780 Ti Superclocked, it runs at the max thermal envelope of 83Celcius when on GPUGRID WUs and the boost will be anywhere in the range of 950-1040Mhz (not sure why its fluctuating, assume its the WU type).

Now I see the NZXT Kraken G10, and am thinking with something realively 'cheap' like an H75 (total investment circa £100 with some small VRM/RAM heatsinks), I could water cool that 780 Ti and remove that 83Celcius thermal limit, without turning my PC into something that sounds like a rocket motor.

I did look at the GPU comparison thread where there were graphs on different GPUs, but honetly I wasnt sure what the conclusion was. So I have to ask the question, do you, experienced folks, think Ill get significantly more GPUGRID performance for my wet £100? Im foolish enough to spend it, but if it wont have any impact on GPUGRID then (to me) its not worth it.

I'm currently running 2 EVGA 780Ti Superclocked (03G-P4-2883-KR) cards in my case. At full boost (1124MHz for one card and 1137MHz for the other) the cards never approach your temps. I'm curious as to why your cards are running so warm.

Do you have good airflow through your case?

Are you running EVGA Precision X / MSI Afterburner or a similar program which allows you to adjust your fan curve/power target/temp target for the cards?

Before I would consider water cooling I would see if there are some changes you can make to your current configuration which will improve things a bit.

Currently, I'm using Precision X and have a Temp Target set at 72C. I've also set a custom fan curve that will max out the fans at 71C. If the cards are still running warmer than 72C at that point, they will downclock one step (13MHz) at a time until they find a speed they can run constantly at 72C. Of course, the ambient room temp will affect all of this.

If you're determined for very quiet operation, water may be the way to go. I'm running an Antec H20 920 on my CPU (also i7-3770K) with the stock fans replaced with a couple Gentle Typhoons. It runs very quietly and performs very well. I've not tried water cooling for GPUs but I've not yet seen a situation where I think it would be worth it.

Hi Matt, thanks for the detailed reply.

I have a Silverstone Fortress FT02 case, I had tried turning up the 3x 180mm intake fans to the max rpm before but felt it really didnt make any difference on either the CPU or GPU temps when I did that, so I run a lot quieter and have the fans on the low setting. Its not hot in my house, maybe 20C ambient.

I have MSI AfterBurner but Im not great at using it, however noted there my 780Ti fan speed was only about 35%.

After a lot of fiddling I have about 80-81C on the card with all my case fans on max and the GPU fan at 75%, but its pretty noisy in here now. I did have 1124 boost as the temps were lower but Im currently sitting at 1111.

Whats your case/cooling setup like Matt, anything I can learn from you?

I guess a part of my question is how sensitive is GPUGRID to overall GPU clock speed very/somewhat/not so much?

One thing of note is the position of the cards, there isn't much room between them, just one slot with the 780Ti fan intake behind the 670 backplate. As the 670 has the windforce cooler it might be an advantage to swap them over. I cant do that in the week, will have to wait for the weekend.

Scalextrix,

I find with both the blower fan exhausting GPU and the ACX dual fans, they both benefit from fan(s) on the side of the case blowing on them. The Silverstone Fortress FT02 case looks to be an interesting case with good overall airflow direction, but no side fan.

I have a mid tower (Cooler Master HAF 922) with a GTX680 blower and dual fan GTX460. Without the side fan on it, had to down clock the 680 to keep temps down and avoid excessive error rates. Added the side fan, no down clocking and only had 1 error in the last 3 months.

From my own experience, I would not run GPU's 24/7 on air without a side fan blowing on these GPU's.

Regards,
Jeremy

Seems that depends on the cardcooler designs, everytime when i set a side fan on dual gpu systems they went much hotter. The best setting always was a opend case ^^ sometimes a fast SUCKING fan with 15cm distance from the gpus help a very little!! bit.
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DSKAG Austria Research Team: http://www.research.dskag.at

Scalextrix,

That's an interesting case setup you have. I've never seen the motherboard oriented that way. Seems everything is set up to bring air in from the bottom and force it out the top of the case with no front, rear, or side fans. It makes sense, using the tendency of hot air to rise.

My 780Ti cards are in an Antec 1200 which I believe will have a bit more airflow than your case. I do use a side fan to blow cooler air onto the cards. As I mentioned above, I use Precision X with a Power Target of 106% and a Temp Target of 72C with the Temp Target prioritized over the Power Target. I have also customized the fan curve to 100% @ 71C and gradually stepping down the speed from there.

The GK110 cards have a higher TDP than other Keplers and tend to produce more heat, so getting that heat away from the cards as soon as possible is critical if one will be running at high loads for extended periods of time as this will both allow for higher clock speeds and extend the lifetime of your card. One possible solution that some people use is to remove the side of your case entirely to allow for more heat escape and to possibly even set up a box fan at that side to direct more cool air in or to exhaust the hot air.

Switching the positioning of your cards sounds like a good idea. As the 780Ti already runs warm, directing the exhaust from the 670 away from it is sure to be a win.

I'm unclear what you mean by GPUGrid being sensitive to GPU clock speed. As far as producing errors, you'll be fine with anything up to your max boost (and maybe just a bit over). This project is, however, sensitive to overclocked cards and will produce more errors if you are overclocking beyond your max boost clocks.

I hope some of this helps. Please keep posting with any other questions.

Firstly thanks for all the responses, everything im reading here is a great help. Yes the FT02 is an unusual design, it was my fist home build and the unorthodox bottom up arrangment appealed based on the hot air rising principal as well as me just being a bit querky and liking to not be mainstream. The massive intake fans push loads of air in but its a bit constrained on exiting the top of the case, as such I added 3x small noctua (30x10mm I think) to an open grille section next to the PCI slots. I cant say they do a great deal but it couldnt hurt, unfortunately 1 died so i just have 2 there now. I only recently added the 780Ti so my setup hasnt been optimised for that, being busy i just bunged it all together and only recently started looking at temperatures an performance.

Based in what im reading ill try to find a way to repurpose those small noctua fans to a position where they might blow air between the GPUs,im wondering if there is a bit if a dead spot as they are close to one another.

My question about sensitivity of GPUGRID to clock speed, let me elaborate; so if my card runs at 900mhz will i only get 0.9 of the performance versus if it ran at 1000mhz? So spending some cash to ensure i run at max boost, will that get me a real uptick in ppd? Or are we into diminishing returns as we clock higher because of other limiting factors(perhaps cpu)? I hear you on overclocking and errors, that is understood.

Scalextrix,

The following items will make GPUGrid WU's process faster....

1) Faster GPU Clock
2) Faster GPU Memory Clock
3) Not running other WU's on integrated GPU on CPU
4) Only running a single WU per logical CPU Core (so if you run two GPU's for GPUGrid, you can run an additional two WU's in your i7-3770k with next to no degradation)
5) Faster CPU speeds

I believe 1 and 3 provide the biggest improvements. The other are all slight improvements. Of course running WU's that take 5 - 20 hours, well pushing too hard and getting errors can really slow a machine down. :)

Regards,
Jeremy

Thanks Jeremy great info, so working to increase my gpu clock within its factory specs will increase work done. I cant test anything til the weekend, when i have results i will share.

Oh, and before I forget as many before me have mentioned...

6) XP and Linux OS are much faster than Win7.

On the SDOERR_BARNA, I run around 16.5k seconds per WU on Win7
Device clock : 1084MHz
Memory clock : 3500MHz

On another 780Ti, SDOERR_BARNA, they are around 17.5k seconds per WU on Win7
Device clock : 1045MHz
Memory clock : 3500MHz

On another 780Ti, SDOERR_BARNA, they are around 23k seconds per WU on Win7
Device clock : 928MHz
Memory clock : 3500MHz

On another 780Ti, SDOERR_BARNA, they are around 17k seconds per WU on Linux
Device clock : 928MHz
Memory clock : 3500MHz

The device clock is only the base default for the card. Unknown actual boost values for all, but it gives a little indication.

Thanks Jeremy, Im not in a position to use WinXP or Linux at the moment, this is my main PC as well so I really need a supported version of Windows, I also work from home regularly so I need all my work applications stable on a platform my work based support can help me manage.

Anyway I tinkered a little:
First off I removed the GTX670 completely, I was surprised to see that made no difference to the 780Ti temperature at all, still went up to 83C.

Then I swapped the position of the cards, the 670 windforce was now in PCIe slot 0, which means its intake fans are behind the backplate of the 780Ti, this made a big difference, 780Ti started to hover around 80-81C, but the 670 still was around 60C.

Then I used afterburner to pump up the fan curve, with approx. 50-60% fan I could now get to about 70C on 780Ti.

Finally I reduced all the case fans to the slower speed, this pushed the 780Ti temperature to about 71C. The 780Ti intake was now directly above the front 180mm case fan, I turned that single fan up to high, and got to a final temp of about 69C.

My only problem now id MSI afterburner will not start at logon, I have tried adding a task in task scheduler etc. but no joy. I think it may be UAC, but even setting Afterburner as Run as Administrator doesn't stop the UAC.

Any ideas?

Just an update the WU I had that hit the 69C was quite a beast, sorry I didn't note the name but it was using 95-100% of the 780Ti power, even at that temp I was 'only' getting 1111Mhz boost. On restarting my machine it failed.

Im on a different WU now starting '2ART4E' and the power is at 81%, temp is down to 66C and Im getting full boost of 1124Mhz.

Im happy with that result, but the 780Ti fan is still reasonably noisy to keep this temp level & full boost. In two minds about that water cooling, still.

Just to close out the 'beast' was a SDOERR_BARNA WU, I have another now, I project it will take about 18k seconds to complete.

Final note, to get max boost on the SDOERR WU i had to increase the power target to 106% in afterburner for the 780ti as the card was limited buy power not temps for these.
Water cooling would not fix that i dont believe.[/code]