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Cooling old cards

MartinTheActor
By MartinTheActor
in Graphics Cards
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I know this may get a what the heck reaction from some here, but my sister needs a graphics card in an old PC. Up 'til now she's had an old Radeon HD5450. So, on browsing CeX, a second hand store here in the UK I found a blower style Nvidia GTX 960 for £35. As she's got a tight budget I figured this might be a great solution for an upgrade whilst she's saving to build a new rig. After cleaning the dust from all the fans and intakes the card was running at around 70oC at idle, so I decided to experiment by removing the cooler and applying thermal paste. That's got the temps down to around 45oC at idle, but under load (Fallout 4 is about the most demanding thing I have on my computer to test it with) the temp shoots up to around 80-90oC.

My question then: Is that 'normal'? I've never had a blower style card so is that usual? I don't want to give her a card if it's going to die on her. Sorry if it's a silly question.

 

If it helps, I am running a Ryzen 5 3600 (stock cooler) on a B550 Pro4 inside a Kolink K5 case. I've got three Arctic P12 PWM intake fans. The front is closed but has a good inch or so on either side that has vents that air should be able to flow through to each of the fans. I have a rear exhaust Arctic P12 PWM. The case has a good six inches of clearance on all sides and is off the floor on a wooden set of office drawers. So, I'm fairly confident I haven't got any airflow or cooling issues. I've had a gigabyte 1050 Ti windforce in there usually and it's never been that hot under the same loads.

I used to work as a tech and consultant, now I've become an odd person who plays dress-up and calls themselves a theatre maker.

My Rig: Ryzen 5 3600 | AsRock B450 Pro4 | Corsair Vengence RGB Pro 16GB 3200Mhz | Asus TUF GeForce 1660 Super OC | Corsair Carbide 175r | XPG Core Reactor 750W
Keyboard Corsair K55 | Mouse Corsair Harpoon | Sound AKG 52 Headphones,

 
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Normal for blower card, blower design inherently has low airflow. Wont die on her, just hot all the time. you could just lower the power limit if it's so much of a concern, since it's a used card it wouldnt hurt to check if it has stock power limit of 120w either (can check with GPU-Z) since cards can be modified to take custom card's BIOS with higher power limit.

CPU: i7-2600K 4751MHz 1.44V (software) --> 1.47V at the back of the socket Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Extreme4 (BCLK: 103.3MHz) CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 RAM: Adata XPG 2x8GB DDR3 (XMP: 2133MHz 10-11-11-30 CR2, custom: 2203MHz 10-11-10-26 CR1 tRFC:230 tREFI:14000) GPU: Asus GTX 1070 Dual (Super Jetstream vbios, +70(2025-2088MHz)/+400(8.8Gbps)) SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB (main boot drive), Transcend SSD370 128GB PSU: Seasonic X-660 80+ Gold Case: Antec P110 Silent, 5 intakes 1 exhaust Monitor: AOC G2460PF 1080p 144Hz (150Hz max w/ DP, 121Hz max w/ HDMI) TN panel Keyboard: Logitech G610 Orion (Cherry MX Blue) with SteelSeries Apex M260 keycaps Mouse: BenQ Zowie FK1

 

Model: HP Omen 17 17-an110ca CPU: i7-8750H (0.125V core & cache, 50mV SA undervolt) GPU: GTX 1060 6GB Mobile (+80/+450, 1650MHz~1750MHz 0.78V~0.85V) RAM: 8+8GB DDR4-2400 18-17-17-39 2T Storage: HP EX920 1TB PCIe x4 M.2 SSD + Crucial MX500 1TB 2.5" SATA SSD, 128GB Toshiba PCIe x2 M.2 SSD (KBG30ZMV128G) gone cooking externally, 1TB Seagate 7200RPM 2.5" HDD (ST1000LM049-2GH172) left outside Monitor: 1080p 126Hz IPS G-sync

 

Desktop benching:

Cinebench R15 Single thread:168 Multi-thread: 833 

SuperPi (v1.5 from Techpowerup, PI value output) 16K: 0.100s 1M: 8.255s 32M: 7m 45.93s

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15 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

Normal for blower card, blower design inherently has low airflow. Wont die on her, just hot all the time. you could just lower the power limit if it's so much of a concern, since it's a used card it wouldnt hurt to check if it has stock power limit of 120w either (can check with GPU-Z) since cards can be modified to take custom card's BIOS with higher power limit.

Thanks, literally never had a blower style and the price seemed right. I've only ever used gigabyte GTX cards in the past.

I used to work as a tech and consultant, now I've become an odd person who plays dress-up and calls themselves a theatre maker.

My Rig: Ryzen 5 3600 | AsRock B450 Pro4 | Corsair Vengence RGB Pro 16GB 3200Mhz | Asus TUF GeForce 1660 Super OC | Corsair Carbide 175r | XPG Core Reactor 750W
Keyboard Corsair K55 | Mouse Corsair Harpoon | Sound AKG 52 Headphones,

 
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