780ti Maintenance maybe?

[newcster2]

Recently my friend with a 780ti was having problems with crashing in a lot of games, our mutual friend suggested he try to downclock his card, so he did and it caused him to stop crashing, despite the fact that his card was never reaching over 85c.  This caused me to become curious about the state of my own 780ti, which has had 0 problems with performance or stability as far as I could see.  However, I noticed that my card would run considerably hotter, up to 95c while playing my games.  We went back and forth about whether or not there is a problem with my card, I decided to look at it physically and see if there was a lot of dust on it, and as far as I could see there was basically no dust at all, even inbetween the heatsink fins.

 

We decided I should run Furmark for a few minutes and review the results (see attached)

 

It never went over 98c, never throttled the core clock, but also never was able to boost up to the ~1130Mhz standard boost frequency.

 

So, my questions are:

Is my card in danger despite not showing any signs of failure?

Should I make a bigger effort to clean my card or even replace the factory thermal paste to increase thermal performance?

Should I be expecting to reach that ~1130 boost clock or even higher frequencies even while running something as demanding as Furmark?

[hconverse02]

Instead of pushing the card, maybe replace the thermal paste 

[Mick Naughty]

If you haven't replaced it yet why is it even being used?

 

Cant blame crashing on the card with zero evidence that suggests so.

[Joshinski]

1 minute ago, Mick Naughty said:

If you haven't replaced it yet why is it even being used?

 

Cant blame crashing on the card with zero evidence that suggests so.

There's no crashing on his card, it even says so. His friend's card was crashing. Read the questions.

[Mick Naughty]

1 minute ago, Joshinski said:

There's no crashing on his card, it even says so. His friend's card was crashing. Read the questions.

So what do you think I'm reefing to then? Read my post.

[NowThatsDamp]

Yeah something is definitely wrong. My 780ti runs at a super super lazy overclock of 1333mhz at 65C with fan at 60% for days on end. 

Maybe try thermal paste. I don't know after that.

In fact, your card is actually thermal throttling right now, as evidenced by the fact that you're over the temp limit but only at 80% power usage. A card that's running at 100% with NO thermal throttling (Like yours should be because the 780ti has a massive die size that runs cool as a cucumber) will stay at 100% - 105% power limit.

[newcster2]

1 minute ago, NowThatsDamp said:

Yeah something is definitely wrong. My 780ti runs at a super super lazy overclock of 1333mhz at 65C with fan at 60% for days on end. 

Maybe try thermal paste. I don't know after that.

Runs at 1333mhz at 65c while at maximum load?  That sounds insane compared to what I'm getting.  I'm not referring to idle temperatures, I'm talking about the performance I'm getting while running Furmark for 5 minutes straight.

[NowThatsDamp]

3 minutes ago, newcster2 said:

Runs at 1333mhz at 65c while at maximum load?  That sounds insane compared to what I'm getting.  I'm not referring to idle temperatures, I'm talking about the performance I'm getting while running Furmark for 5 minutes straight.

Yeah I actually mean 1333mhz at 65C after keeping the GPU pinned at 100% with BOINC for about a month nonstop. 780ti EVGA ACX cooler bought in Q4 2013 and running BOINC almost nonstop for the last 4 years.

Granted, that's in a cool basement. It would probably be around 70C if I had it upstairs.

Get that cooler off and get out the thermal paste.

[Mick Naughty]

Shouldn't be running furmark at all. I downlcocked mine to 1150 and would sit in the mid 50's while gaming for hours. But that's with a vapor chamber.

 

Basic maintenance and try it again. Still hard to say with zero info on the rog itself and scenario. 

[Tailmon1]

If it is still running down clocked. It is a good guess that something in the cooling end is not up to snuff. I once had a R9 270X 4gb card I was running in

SLI  Everything seemed fine but I was getting some temp issues. I opened the case and sure enough a Fan had gone to Fan heaven. So it was running

with one fan. Since it was still under warranty I sent it in for repair. I suggest watching for a lazy fan or dead one. If they are running fine its prob time for

a thermal paste reapply.

[newcster2]

Just now, NowThatsDamp said:

Yeah I actually mean 1333mhz at 65C after keeping the GPU pinned at 100% with BOINC for about a month nonstop. 780ti EVGA ACX cooler bought in Q4 2013 and running BOINC almost nonstop for the last 4 years.

So have you replaced your thermal paste or done any other modification to reach that level of performance? Or is that how the stock card has run for this many years?  Perhaps there's an issue with my case cooling...

[NowThatsDamp]

5 minutes ago, newcster2 said:

So have you replaced your thermal paste or done any other modification to reach that level of performance? Or is that how the stock card has run for this many years?  Perhaps there's an issue with my case cooling...

No that's how it ran on day 1 and the performance has never degraded. It does run on an open test bench, so you could check your case, but unless it's in a closed carboard box, that's probably not the issue. Case ventilation doesn't matter nearly as much as people tend to think it does.

My guess is that you got unlucky with the paste and just need a fresh squirt.

Skip to 7:20 on the first video

 

 

[newcster2]

8 minutes ago, NowThatsDamp said:

No that's how it ran on day 1 and the performance has never degraded. It does run on an open test bench, so you could check your case, but unless it's in a closed carboard box, that's probably not the issue. Case ventilation doesn't matter nearly as much as people tend to think it does.

My guess is that you got unlucky with the paste and just need a fresh squirt.

I actually just decided to run the same test with Furmark while the case is open.  Already I'm running cooler, faster, with more power delivery.  I definitely have a problem with my case airflow.  I'm gonna try to flip one of my fans around in my case to see if I can improve this.

[newcster2]

I was already going to be replacing my rear case fan because it would tend to rattle a little bit and sometimes stop.  I should have taken that as a sign that it might not even be spinning fast enough to actually blow air in any direction in my case.  Already bought a new fan that should be coming and this should improve the thermal performance of my card.

Thanks @NowThatsDamp!

[Mick Naughty]

Could just take the side panel off, sounds like a blower card unless the airflow is unexpectedly bad. The fan at max already or still using an auto profile?