have you ever wondered about the placement of expansion cards in your rig
and how they might affect your graphics card temperatures and vice versa well
today we're going to explore that from a few different angles how much does it
matter in what scenarios does it matter and how much do you need to worry about
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Intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their new core i76700 K and core i56600k
processors check the link in the video description to learn more so for this
video we can't actually use our standard test bench because an open air rig would
really screw with the test results compared to a close-off standard case
which is the majority of what users will have these days so we need to go with a
fairly standard scenario computer case in order to properly explore the
temperature changes in these VAR ious scenarios from here I chose two
different graphics cards for testing a referenc 980 TI and an open air internal
exhaust cooled styled uh G1 gaming 980
from Gigabyte to control the temperatures in the rest of the case we
used a 240 mm aiio cooler to pull the heat away from the CPU and what is a
pretty common use case uh these days and
we used a control graphics card to interfere with the airflow of the two
other test cards I use a Titan X as our control card as it isn't too long and it
isn't too short but being a blower style card it shouldn't be dumping a huge
amount of heat into the rest of our bench and messing with the card in more
substantial ways than just blocking off some of the airflow I did our standard
Crisis 3 Skybox test for about 10 minutes recording temperatures and clock
speeds as I went through um using the
current test cards numbers one thing to note is that this is not a direct
comparison of whether a blower or internal exhaust style card is uh better
at cooling itself but if you want to see this Linus already has a video on it so
just check it out up here in the top right hand corner there were many
opportunities for feature creep in this video the amount of potential scenarios
was a little insane so we had to tone it down to what we saw as the most common
possible scenarios of which we decided on a full-size average length test
graphics cards and a full-size average length Control Card which will be placed
either directly against the test card as close as possible or as far away as
possible um on a seven expansion slot case which is the bottom two slots so
basically the question is how much of an advantage are you gaining by pulling
your second expansion card as far away as possible from the first I think it's
pretty common knowledge that largely blocking the airf flow to one of your
expansion cards if you have another option isn't exactly ideal but how much
of an impact is it really well as these are ultimately different cards and
comparing them together isn't really the point let's look at them individually
first up we have the blower style card this is our
gtx980ti this card already being on the edge of its cooling capabilities with an
ambient room temperature of only actually 24° didn't actually change what
temperature it ran depending on where the expansion card was placed which
sounds great at first but what it did do is pretty substantially change its
effective clock speed due to how GPU boost Works check out the video in the
top right hand corner here if you want to know what the heck GPU boost does the
difference here between no control card installed and the control card in the
worst possible position right next to our test card is a whopping 114 MHz
which would actually be quite a noticeable difference in terms of performance but that's not where the
story ends as the difference between the control card being right below the test
card and the control card being as far away as possible is still 88 MHz which
is still a very noticeable performance Improvement just for optimizing your
expansion card layout but what about the internal exhaust card
well the G1 gaming 980 actually did
manage to get away from the good old classic NVIDIA standard of
83° while by itself in the case meaning
that when we added the control card in the furthest away position the clock
speed didn't go down like it did with the blower card but the temperature did
go up slightly but it still did go up
that being said when we put the control card right up against it the temperature
shot up to the previously mentioned 83°
and the clock speed shot down by a huge
139 mahz whoa I had already assumed this
card would be impacted more heavily but that's
huge ah so in conclusion this whole
thing probably wasn't as surprising as it was interesting to me at least sure
bad expansion card placement might not always even be up to you you might have
to do certain things and sure like I just said some scenarios you can't help
it and most people won't even run into this problem because they'll probably
only have one card but there are some scenarios even if you do only have one
card the ever more popular as time goes
on small ITX style systems where you may
have to put your card directly against a side panel for instance could benefit
from this knowledge and you may want to stay wary of that when choosing a case
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through the Forum now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click
the little button in the top right hand corner to check out the video I mentioned earlier where I investigate
the impact of GPU boost hopefully someone will kind of step up soon so I
can look more into how it affects internal exhaust cards that aren't
always pinned against their temperature limits like some blower cards that I
tested earlier