janky RX590 nitro fan mod

[tuxa wow]

hi

 

i decided to burn some money, and replaced my replacement arctic fans (drilled onto the shroud) with noctua fans (this time mounted with zips onto the heatsink). some titles torture my gpu with on my ultrawide, so i thought a fan on the heatsink with bigger static pressure might cool down 5 degrees. or just let me run at a lower rpm.

 

the results? unimpressive. ive been testing my fan placements recently, and have some over ambient data (ill upload them as well later). the temps are about the same. the noise is kind of the same. if i cant hear the difference, no point measuring it.

 

the most disappointing thing is the subtle whine/tone pule when the fans run above 70%. it is really low level, but since im in a quiet room these noise pulses are noticeable. like when a "laser goes back and forth, just as a quiet sound instead" if it makes any sense.

 

this was the same reason i did the 1st mod with the arctic fans. the stock fans were terrible the tone pulse was noticeable at 19%. then on a diffrent day it was noticeable at 18%. so i was watching youtube, then that thing started to make noise cause  why not. using 0 rpm was not an option, because it would heat up anyway sooner or later, and the fan startup noise was annoying too.

 

so what do you think? how could i improve my temps? would putting the fans on the shroud help? its a lot of hassle with zip ties, so i did this post. now i set it at 1490MHz instead of the stock 1560, and reduced the voltage a bit as well. kombuster with cpu burner made it to 79 with acceptable noise levels. playing no mans sky uncapped put it at 75, with only 1300 rpm. 

 

thanks!

[Bitter]

You're part way there undervolting, I have had a lot of luck dropping my RX580 volts to get more stable clocks at lower temps which gave better performance than max clocks at max temps and hitting some thermal throttle, that gave me the stutters badly. The RX590 is wild, it's a 580 turned up to 11 and it runs hot no matter what. I think you're actually doing pretty OK, if the paste is old get fresh paste and look up about increasing mounting pressure with washers, that can help sometimes too.

[Bitter]

The next step would be trying water cooling, with the current GPU market that might not be a poor investment, the gain would mostly be lower noise and putting the heat outside the case for better CPU thermal performance. I don't know anything about water cooling Polaris cards and how much it helps, sadly. My 580 is mining Ethereum in the basement so it's not free to tinker with and has a very beefy stock cooler being a Red Devil model, it was capable of 'golden sample' speeds but it was too loud for my tastes. As I get older I like quiet hardware more than bleeding edge speed.

[tuxa wow]

41 minutes ago, Bitter said:

The next step would be trying water cooling, with the current GPU market that might not be a poor investment, the gain would mostly be lower noise and putting the heat outside the case for better CPU thermal performance. I don't know anything about water cooling Polaris cards and how much it helps, sadly. My 580 is mining Ethereum in the basement so it's not free to tinker with and has a very beefy stock cooler being a Red Devil model, it was capable of 'golden sample' speeds but it was too loud for my tastes. As I get older I like quiet hardware more than bleeding edge speed.

yes, same reason i bought a passive psu and a big ssd. i dont think the sapphire rx 590 water cooling market exists, if it does im sure not at a reasonable price.

 

putting it outside the case is a good one. ive been thinking about that as well. that would require creating my own case. though i might just pop open the side panel instead.

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, tuxa wow said:

yes, same reason i bought a passive psu and a big ssd. i dont think the sapphire rx 590 water cooling market exists, if it does im sure not at a reasonable price.

 

putting it outside the case is a good one. ive been thinking about that as well. that would require creating my own case. though i might just pop open the side panel instead.

With a PCIe extension and a bracket you could mount it to the side panel on the outside of the case in hilarious fashion, but to make it not look janky would be a undertaking.

[tuxa wow]

yo!

 

I did some update. short version: i have a 590 undervolted (gpu+mem), slightly underclocked (1490), running kombustor furmark at 62 degrees in a 23 deg room. the extra thing was putting paste on the mem chips, then putting the olds pds back, then putting paste on the pads as well.

 

long one!

- removed the noctua fans, and put back the arctic 90mm pwm fans. i noticed, they also do the pulse-whine but much less noticeable

- put some tape between the side gap, so maybe more air goes through the fans (mildly useless)

 

however, i decided to undervolt the memory as well. it made the card much cooler. it dropped like 3-5 degrees, I could rev back a bit of fanspeed as well. couldn't pust the card over 80, which is like, what?!

 

this put a bug in my mind. what if the gpu isnt very hot? what if its the memory? i wanted to check in hw info. however, there is no memory temp! the whole card just puts out an overall average.

 

so today i decided to cut the zip ties up, and redo the paste. i tore up some thermal pads. i have some dirty replacements, but they are a bit thicker. anyway, i put paste on the gpu (i did that less than a year ago, it was still gooey). i also put paste on the memory chips. then i put the pads back, then i also put paste on the pads. then i assembled the thing again.

 

i had some crashes, i couldn't put them on the gpu, because i switched the stability test to cinebench+kombustor. the system hung up, but came back after a minute. kumbuster no responding, cinebech popped and error after a while: some graphics error. next: tried again, started kombustor, up and running. then as i clicked on the cinebench icon it crashed again.

 

so i ditched cinebench, used the kombustor furmark and the kombustor cpu burner (which isnt as hard, but whatever). 30 mins, no crash. i think thats a win!

[Bitter]

12 minutes ago, tuxa wow said:

yo!

 

I did some update.:

 

I don't think that post went right, I can't see anything.

[tuxa wow]

here are some numbers. these are just as janky as the gpu i zip tied to the fans. so i tuned the fans between tests to make them a useable system. i tried to make the noise as minimal as possible without hurting the performance. so take them with a bottle of salt. 

 

i forgot to mention, that i flipped my fans and removed one from the case. using less fans is.. better in my case!