Video Card Ventilation - Does card proximity affect temperatures?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,319 words · ~6 min read
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have you ever wondered about the placement of expansion cards in your rig
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and how they might affect your graphics card temperatures and vice versa well
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today we're going to explore that from a few different angles how much does it
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matter in what scenarios does it matter and how much do you need to worry about
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this kind of problem hit the like button if you like the idea of three or more
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hosts on scrapyard Wars and if you'd want to see that
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again
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Intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their new core i76700 K and core i56600k
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processors check the link in the video description to learn more so for this
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video we can't actually use our standard test bench because an open air rig would
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really screw with the test results compared to a close-off standard case
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which is the majority of what users will have these days so we need to go with a
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fairly standard scenario computer case in order to properly explore the
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temperature changes in these VAR ious scenarios from here I chose two
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different graphics cards for testing a referenc 980 TI and an open air internal
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exhaust cooled styled uh G1 gaming 980
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from Gigabyte to control the temperatures in the rest of the case we
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used a 240 mm aiio cooler to pull the heat away from the CPU and what is a
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pretty common use case uh these days and
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we used a control graphics card to interfere with the airflow of the two
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other test cards I use a Titan X as our control card as it isn't too long and it
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isn't too short but being a blower style card it shouldn't be dumping a huge
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amount of heat into the rest of our bench and messing with the card in more
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substantial ways than just blocking off some of the airflow I did our standard
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Crisis 3 Skybox test for about 10 minutes recording temperatures and clock
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speeds as I went through um using the
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current test cards numbers one thing to note is that this is not a direct
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comparison of whether a blower or internal exhaust style card is uh better
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at cooling itself but if you want to see this Linus already has a video on it so
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just check it out up here in the top right hand corner there were many
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opportunities for feature creep in this video the amount of potential scenarios
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was a little insane so we had to tone it down to what we saw as the most common
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possible scenarios of which we decided on a full-size average length test
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graphics cards and a full-size average length Control Card which will be placed
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either directly against the test card as close as possible or as far away as
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possible um on a seven expansion slot case which is the bottom two slots so
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basically the question is how much of an advantage are you gaining by pulling
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your second expansion card as far away as possible from the first I think it's
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pretty common knowledge that largely blocking the airf flow to one of your
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expansion cards if you have another option isn't exactly ideal but how much
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of an impact is it really well as these are ultimately different cards and
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comparing them together isn't really the point let's look at them individually
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first up we have the blower style card this is our
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gtx980ti this card already being on the edge of its cooling capabilities with an
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ambient room temperature of only actually 24° didn't actually change what
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temperature it ran depending on where the expansion card was placed which
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sounds great at first but what it did do is pretty substantially change its
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effective clock speed due to how GPU boost Works check out the video in the
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top right hand corner here if you want to know what the heck GPU boost does the
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difference here between no control card installed and the control card in the
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worst possible position right next to our test card is a whopping 114 MHz
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which would actually be quite a noticeable difference in terms of performance but that's not where the
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story ends as the difference between the control card being right below the test
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card and the control card being as far away as possible is still 88 MHz which
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is still a very noticeable performance Improvement just for optimizing your
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expansion card layout but what about the internal exhaust card
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well the G1 gaming 980 actually did
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manage to get away from the good old classic NVIDIA standard of
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83° while by itself in the case meaning
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that when we added the control card in the furthest away position the clock
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speed didn't go down like it did with the blower card but the temperature did
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go up slightly but it still did go up
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that being said when we put the control card right up against it the temperature
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shot up to the previously mentioned 83°
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and the clock speed shot down by a huge
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139 mahz whoa I had already assumed this
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card would be impacted more heavily but that's
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huge ah so in conclusion this whole
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thing probably wasn't as surprising as it was interesting to me at least sure
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bad expansion card placement might not always even be up to you you might have
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to do certain things and sure like I just said some scenarios you can't help
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it and most people won't even run into this problem because they'll probably
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only have one card but there are some scenarios even if you do only have one
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card the ever more popular as time goes
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on small ITX style systems where you may
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have to put your card directly against a side panel for instance could benefit
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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
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the little button in the top right hand corner to check out the video I mentioned earlier where I investigate
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the impact of GPU boost hopefully someone will kind of step up soon so I
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can look more into how it affects internal exhaust cards that aren't
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always pinned against their temperature limits like some blower cards that I
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tested earlier