What's a safe GPU temperature?

[gurnben]

Hey Guys, I'm back with another quick question.  I have two GTX 770s in SLI and they are both EVGA ACX SC.  I don't have the best air flow in my enthoo pro yet, but I am working on it.  When I ran Heaven benchmark, my bottom card reached 80C and throttled (as 79 is my temp goal) and my top card maxed at around 60C.  I saw on the recent video on the Gigabyte gaming G1 980 that Luke had the max temp set at 96C.  So what is a safe temp for a card to reach when running at full load?

[FloRolf]

i'd go as high as 85°C tbh.

 

BUT 96°C is still save for the card not to burst into a fire.

[FatalityDiablo]

0-95°C is safe

 

edit: althou i would want my gpu to run at 70°C at max

[SeanBond]

If you want you card to live a long life anything under 85c should be fine. I personally have my temp target at 82. 95c is only for very short term testing. Even then I wouldn't be comfortable letting it go past 90 even when testing. 

[gurnben]

Did you set your temp goal to 85C then?

[gurnben]

OK, that makes a lot of sense, I will set mine to 83 as well, it didn't exceed that at all during the benchmark!

[Face2Face]

The cards will automatically throttle at 80c, regardless what you have your temp target set to. Try it out for yourself and see.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7392/the-geforce-gtx-770-roundup-evga-gigabyte-and-msi-compared/6

 

From Ryan's article-

 

Open air coolers as a general design are difficult to improve on, so despite everyone’s efforts, unless someone uses a wildly different fan curve than the others then any well designed open air cooler should perform similar. Notably, because every card tops out at 66C, they’re all well below the thermal throttle point on the GTX 770 of 80C.