7950 cooling solutions

[Pinscher]

fisrt posting, pictures to follow.
im a proud owner of a xfx 7950core. it over clocks well for a reference card. 1100/1500. temps at 98 degrees. outrageous huh?.

so i took my artict twin turbo off my 4890 and reused the base from the xfx core cooler and slapped it all together. the twin turbo didnt fit, so i shimmed it up with a piece of copper and it seems to go well. mu temps are down to 70. thats nearly 30 less then the stock solution.


The problem is that i get blue screens now. it happens in multiple games like starcraft or hon. hon less so, sc after 25min or so. i recieve no window hardware events and i log my temps (belowe 70).

i have a few questions.

1. is the stock base heat spreader not effective at cooling the vram without the original cooler?
2. is the copper shim i placed in between the twin turbo copper core and gpu horrible idea? i applied paste to both side and prepared the surfaces.


im leaning towards vram heat.

any trouble shooting ideas would be nice

 

[erocker]

Vram doesn't get very hot so I wouldn't worry about that. Use a program like GPU-Z, Afterburner or HWinfo and see what your VRM temperatures are like.

 

[RCoon]

Using a 4890 cooler on a 7950?!
VRams dont even get that hot unless you're pouring a shed load of voltage through the card.
I can clock both of my XFX 7950's to 1.1ghz and 1400 mem with 1.18 volts and they will hit 83 degrees at maximum peak. Either your voltage is fucking ridiculous, and your card is shitting its pants because of it, or your card is extremely weird/defective. Put it at stock everything and test. If it works, try clocking it without changing the voltage.
Please tell me what the error code of the blue screen is, 0x124?

 

[AsRock]

Any chance you can just take the metal shroud and fan and just zip tie 2 120mm fans to it ?.

 

[Cotton_Cup]

well you can try it out no harm done. or use your aircon if you have one. and connect something like those in water cooling.

 

[Pinscher]

So i've taken some pictures.

These is what i came up with. a copper shim that fits within the aluminium restraints around the gpu.

update. so i also had a Win32k.sys bosd.
it trashed my OS and was unable to recover it.

I've re installed windows 7 and about to test out starcraft agian.

Both cpu and gpu are at stock settings

 

[Pinscher]

thanks for your more useful reply.

Vram doesn't get very hot so I wouldn't worry about that. Use a program like GPU-Z, Afterburner or HWinfo and see what your VRM temperatures are like.

for Vram temps, how hot is not very hot?

 

[Pinscher]

1.1ghz 1400 mem

Using a 4890 cooler on a 7950?!
VRams dont even get that hot unless you're pouring a shed load of voltage through the card.
I can clock both of my XFX 7950's to 1.1ghz and 1400 mem with 1.18 volts and they will hit 83 degrees at maximum peak. Either your voltage is fucking ridiculous, and your card is shitting its pants because of it, or your card is extremely weird/defective. Put it at stock everything and test. If it works, try clocking it without changing the voltage.
Please tell me what the error code of the blue screen is, 0x124?

I was able to hit 1100 with 1.188 volts and 1400 mem. I havn't be able to go past 1400. I can only equate that my memory is of lessor quality since my version is a "core" version.

pls correct me if i'm wrong

 

[Pinscher]

seems fixed

So, i pulled the card and removed the heat sink and reset it all up again.
The shim of copper was in the right place so i'm not sure if that was the cause of the system failures.

Right now with no OC i was able to play through 2 hours of SC with no incidents. I suppose the cause of grief was possible cross version driver issues, or a corrupted install of driver/system files.

I'm going to reapply the OC to my computer and try again.

 

[RCoon]

Looks like VRM temps are OK to me. I only got 83 degrees on my overclock due to having crossfire, so the heat was maddening.
If it seems stable, and your temps arent skytailing above 80 degrees, you can call it a day. GPU's can take more heat, but it isnt worth it.

 

[BiggieShady]

for Vram temps, how hot is not very hot?

erocker was referring to VRAM as video random access memory, not VRM as voltage regulation module.

Looking at your pics, I see you've put heatsinks both on VRAM and VRMs, so you should be fine.

 

[d1nky]

vrms look spot on, similar to mine with oc!

what psu have you got? when I had some cheap things my temps were 10-15*c higher.

whats going on with the vrm power tho?? my power display is totally different on my 7950

I would of found the cause to the heat (98*c) before going destructive. ambient temps? voltage? thermal paste? etc

 

[Pinscher]

vrms look spot on, similar to mine with oc!

what psu have you got? when I had some cheap things my temps were 10-15*c higher.

whats going on with the vrm power tho?? my power display is totally different on my 7950

I would of found the cause to the heat (98*c) before going destructive. ambient temps? voltage? thermal paste? etc


http://img.techpowerup.org/130411/vrm.png

The cause of the heat was the overclock and a fail stock designed cooler. The fans ran at 70% all the time and up to 95% with oc while stressing the card.

Now my temps are down 20 degrees and artic fans at 63%.

My power supply is a silver stone 800watt single rail 12v. i like it since its quite stable. and case has excelent air flow which is why i concluded xfx core cooler not to be sufficient at cooling.

On a side note, my old e8400 doesnt like to be overclocked while running my OS off od my intel 520 ssd. The oc corrupted my windows install and it required a fresh install to fix. After reinstalling my vid overclocks fine.

conclusion: can't have everything when you buy stock vids or run a 6 year old system.

vrm, i dont know anything about these so i cant repky to your question about their measure.