If I'm not watercooling, should I leave the plastic shroud on the GPU? I have 5 7950s running on a Gigabyte UD-5 Motherboard mining LTC with no shrouds. I believe they're rather adequately spaced, and I have a big 20" Lasko Cyclone fan pointed at them, yet I'm always seeming to get mid 80s to 90C on the cards. I know some of them aren't spaced exactly right and that will be changed soon. A friend of mine is making some custom open-air wood frames for me that will be stackable so I can put 4 rigs together (two beside and two on top of them) and get a big construction sized fan to blow air through them.
Cards are Powercolor AX7950s and are voltage locked (I'll be buying unlocked ones next time as I know of some now). Powertune is set to 20 on them. Getting about 535kH/s per card with standard riser cables (not powered, but some are on the way to see if it will boost the kH/s and let me drop the powertune to -5 or -10).
I would love to get the temps down a bit on these without having to pay for expensive watercooling. Soon I'll be renting a place to build 4 more rigs and put all 6 in and let the rigs pay the electric bill (my apartment doesn't have the juice necessary to feed 6 rigs like this). Then I'll slowly accumulate more rigs. Any suggestions would be welcomed to get these temps lower! Thanks!
-Moose
Pic:
http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k13/CaptainMooseInc/photo_zps91f2430d.jpgThe reason for the unnecessary men clock is it generates heat, also too you wanna spread out the heat in the room those cases are too close together. You might wanna get another case. I wouldn't suggest no more than 3 that close together. I have 5 of the diamond 7970's, 2 of the HIS 7970's and a 5830 running. Each case only has 2 cards. Because the heat from the bottom card will transfer to the top card causing it to run hotter.
I have noticed that the blade fan that the diamond 7970 uses, while yes it is much much louder, does a way better job of staying cool than the HIS's.
Leave the power settings at default. You should be kickin more MH out than that. Also are you running a extra dedicated power supply for those extra cards? A guy at Microcenter told me you can run 3 cards fine without any power issues. Trying to do more you are risking frying the PS/MB/GPUs. Hope that helps a bit.
