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I have two identical EVGA GTX 780s (6mb) with one GTX 750Ti between them. The top 780 consistently runs about 10 deg. C hotter than the lower 780 during rendering.

Are there any easy-to-install, inexpensive liquid cooling solutions that I can slap onto this one card without having to liquid cool the whole rig?
I see lots of liquid CPU coolers, some as low as $70 and was wondering if anyone has tried putting one of these on a GPU? Or is the single round puck too small to make any real difference? (or simply not compatible).

The card generally tops out at 80-81 degrees. Is this considered hot, and if so, will it slow the card's performance or reduce its life?
If I open up the side panel, it still gets to 80 deg. but takes longer to get there.

The case has good ventilation, with two large fans in front (sucking in) and one at the back and one above. I added two small manually adjustable fans that I Jerry-rigged up against on the card (one against the end blowing cool air from the front of the case into the card and one against the edge of the card sucking warm air out the open side. Even with them cranked up (noisy), it only seems to go one degree cooler. It's odd that the lower card should be so much cooler even without extra fans on it. I'm guessing it is because the top card is closest to the CPU. I tested deactivating the other two cards in Octane to see if heat rising from the cards below makes any difference, but it didn't.

Any recommendations will be most welcome!

Hi, Buggy,

Corsair is making HG N780 Bracket to Couple GTX 7xx GPUs & AIO Liquid Coolers , but.. it's still unreleased (as far as I know) - I've covered it's features lightly on my site & it's pretty interesting.

but the problem is that it was designed for reference cards, & I might be wrong, but I feel 6giggers are non reference PCBs, so take a good look before jumping on it =)

so what would be the best solution without buying full loop, custom components, etc? well,..

a. You can take a look into Fractal Designs expandable AIO coolers & get a propper waterblock for Your GPU - this will be quite easy, the question if that's a wise option?

I mean You pay not so little, so why not to step a bit further & get something even better that is much more future proof? so with that in mind..

b. AquaComputer with integrated pump, (Like D5 let's say) This will be more expensive, but it will be way easier to expand, still have main components (Pump/rad/res) in one place (You can get feet, wall mounting for those too), so at least in my eyes - that's way better investment & plus You can choose low spinning fans that will perform insanely good. (& Yeah You need full cover waterblock)

c. the most messy, is simply to DIY mounting method of AIO (google up) - be aware, that this method don't cool You vRam & more important VRMs - that might get quite hot, thus You need some sticky heatsinks & very good airflow..- not a perfect, nor too good looking solution + considering that DIY mounting could fail easier too.. & You probably don't get so good temps nor performance boost Like You would get from choosing a. or b. routes - but but this cost less than those too..

Last, but not least =) do You really need watercooling? (80C is normal operating temperature, I would start worrying only if it's 95+C =). If the answer is Yes, than what are Your other reasons, preferences (do You want solution to be cheep or do You prefer silence, or Quality..???) & finally what's Your budget..future plans..- list those all & think good - that will help You to make proper decision =)

cheers

Thank you Glimpse for the thorough details! They all look like good options. I like the Corsair bracket, if it turns out to be compatible, but you have helped to reassure me that maybe I don't need to do anything after all. I had been under the impression from some earlier thread that it might not be good to go over 80 deg. for an extended period but hadn't found anything definitive on this.

I'm about to render an animated sequence with approx. 5000 frames and in order to be able to get it done in a reasonable amount of time (over 80 hours), I think I will need to limit each frame render to 1 minute (approx 83 hours of render time at 14.4M samples/sec.) The quality isn't as high as I'd like but it should be okay (about 400 samples per rendered frame). One benefit of the relatively short render time per frame is that the cards briefly cool down somewhat between frames.

I really appreciate all your wonderful guidance. I am very happy with the configuration that you helped steer me towards last year. It is light years faster than my old setup, but of course one can never have enough speed

Corsair bracket is a nice option & if it works as promised - that might be a life saver for those using single GPU..- going to two, three or even four - custom loop start making more and more sense..

80C degree is out-of-the-box temperature target for Kepler based cards under load, so don't even worry about that =)..try to get proper airflow (as much as You can) & space out cards so they would have some space in between to breath =) non reference design coolers are actually very effective, but could get bit starved if place nearby (temperatures will remain almost the same, but fans will start spinning faster & speeds of card will be throttled down) - we talk about such issues in article with Sebastian, a.k.a. Smicha in Value build for GPU rendering. read through if You want to gain some insights 'bout benefits (caution: it's quite a long piece =)

happy to help =) keep rendering!

It was a very interesting read -- kept me engaged throughout! I can see the benefits of cooling everything, including the silent operation.
I hadn't really considered that the liquid cooling could provide such a significant performance boost. That would be nice to have, but for the time being I'm going to wait given that will be fine at 80 degrees (unless my budget takes a sudden turn for the better!)
Thanks again!

buggy wrote:It was a very interesting read -- kept me engaged throughout! I can see the benefits of cooling everything, including the silent operation.
I hadn't really considered that the liquid cooling could provide such a significant performance boost. That would be nice to have, but for the time being I'm going to wait given that will be fine at 80 degrees (unless my budget takes a sudden turn for the better!)
Thanks again!

Yeah, I was surprised 'bout such boost too. However high costs doesn't make too much sense of building a loop for single card =) if You want to get it running cooler or producing less heat, solutions like Corsair bracket seems to fit better, especially if You try to lower costs..

again, 80C is fine, fire up GPUZ, log the monitorint & see later how Your card was running.. if You don't reach 95C - there's no need to worry.. =)

Glimpse is right - watercooling makes sense only if you have 4 gpus or more.

Have you tried EVGA Precision X or MSI Afterburner?
I'm running 3 Titans on air and using Precision X. My temps stay between 60-70C.

80 degrees seems like the doorway to the "Scary Temp Zone".
If I had the time to tear down & water cool, I would, but kinda busy right now.

Hope you find a good solution.

More good info -- thank you.
I downloaded EVGA Precision (I tried to get it last year but I think they had taken it down to rebuild it). It works great.
So, I don't really have a problem after all, since running at 80 degrees is okay. But in the interest of this discussion I did some comparisons using the settings and observed a few things. By default the hotter card is being throttled back about 10% when it reaches 80 deg. Presumably if I raise the GPU Temp Target, it won't throttle the clock until the new temp setting is reached, but I don't really want to run over 80 deg. If I change the fan curve setting to "Aggressive" then it still reaches 80 deg. but the clock speed stays as high as the other card. But it is loud with the fans in overdrive, so I think I'll stick with the default. With two other cards in the PC, the overall samples/minute hit from the one card is small.

Another positive is that since I'm going to need to keep my render times to about 1 minute per frame, it appears that this isn't quite enough time for the card to get hot enough to be throttled back (the card cools a bit between frames). I did a comparison with the default and aggressive fan settings and they both completed the same number of samples in one minute. So, for this reason I think I'll leave everything set as is for the time being.

I checked the Corsair compatibility list and my non-reference card will work. At first they required one to get a blower fan for certain cards like mine, but they since decided to include a blower fan with the product. At $40 plus the cooler it may be the lowest cost option. The MSRP for their cooler is $130. I wonder if other coolers will work with the bracket (some are available for around $70). . .

Thanks again.