Asus R9 290x + Kraken G12

[miagisan]

Making this post for 2 reasons, to help others and to solve a weird issue. 

 

First, 

I got sick and tired of the heat and noise the Asus R9 290x Directcu II was putting out. What Asus was smoking with slapping that cooler on was beyond me. 

 

The card isn't officially supported by Nzxt as it is a non reference pcb. But it works just fine. You have to remove 1 part of the backplate (it's a small 1 inch wide portion of the backplate that hangs down the side) and don't use the washers supplied by nzxt or the screws won't reach. 

 

I used a corsair h55 water cooler with it. Temperatures went from 88c at 80% fan speed to 67c at 30% fan speed. It's amazing.

 

The problem

The card kept crashing to a black screen, even at idle. After much troubleshooting I noticed that on hwmonitor64 I was getting a shit ton of gpu memory errors (talking thousands). This told me that the card was suddenly not getting enough power (at stock, no OC). I raised the core voltage by 15mv and sure enough it is rock solid stable for the last 6 hours. 

 

Now it's not really a problem, as it's working great with a slight bump in power, but it's my ocd that's keeping my head scratching. Without the shitty dcii cooler, I had to give it an extra bump in voltage. Any ideas? Or should I just ignore it and hope my ocd doesn't get the best of me lol. 

 

The pump and fan are plugged into my mobo, and pump is working fine. Vrm temps and gpu temps are low (each around mid to high 60s) at load 

 

Specs

Fx 6300 at 4.6mhz 1.4125 v

Gigabyte 970 UD3P Rev. 2

Asus R9 290x direct cu ii 4gb

Corsair hx750 power supply