Ways to cool an ASUS CuCore ATI Radeon HD5770?Follow

Granted I haven't owned this card very long I'm concerned if this is a normal temp for my card to be running at. I have an ASUS CuCore ATI Radeon HD5770 1GB GDDR5 128-bit card. Very recently I've come to find when running the FFXIV benchmark under low settings my card runs extremely loud and hits temps of 105c with fan speed reaching 100%. The card isn't overclocked either, otherwise the card just reaches temps of 90-95c when running it. Soon as the benchmark's closed the temp drops down into the 50's before idling around 43-45c. My case has a 120mm fan towards the bottom blowing air across my two HDD and to the video card but there's an issue of several cords being in the way. Unfortunately there's next to nothing I can do about this due to the layout of my system. I've done my best to try clearing a path but not much more I can do. Additionally, I've got a small 80mm fan mounted on the side to bring air in blowing over the video card. It doesn't seem to help much really...

I've thought about buying a PCI slot fan and mounting it under the video card to suck air out but I don't know if that may make problems worse. My case is well ventilated with slotted plate covers in the rear and plenty of room in the inside. Overall I've got two front fans, one rear, and one side with CPU temps sitting at 30-50c even under full load and overclocked.

Edited, Aug 7th 2010 10:12pm by SamusKnight

Unfortunately an exchange/return is a no-go... I purchased it from an eBay user so I'm stuck with it. Apart from the high temps (Actually somewhat common but still too high than what it should be.) the card doesn't have any problems. I've removed the heatsink and fan from the card and applied some artic silver 5 to it and it seems to have helped slightly. The one issue I HAVE noticed however is that the heatsink isn't completely flat. At the very center it comes to a slight point, I'm betting it's not making full contact with the VGA chip because of this. Would buying an aftermarket cooler to replace my card's cooler work?

And by the way, running Guild Wars in full screen with v-sync on drops the GPU temp to about 75-77c. Current room temp is about 80F with my window open. I've noticed that despite having a lower fan there doesn't seem to be much air circulating around the bottom of my case. Plenty above but very little at the bottom. The bottom fan on the front of my case is running at a rated 1404RPM right now.

You have 2 options if the heatsync is not flat. 1, you can get some really fine wet dry sandpaper and a very flat block of some sort, prefferably metal or hard plastic, and "lapp" the block, essentially sand it completely flat and smooth. This takes a fair bit of time and some skill.

Option 2 would be to consider an alternate cooler. I'd reccommend water cooling if you go to the trouble. You may be able to find something here that will do the trick. http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php

You may also want to look at your computer case. 95c under load is wayyyyy high for that card. I'd suspect in addition to the video card heatsync you have a fan flow issue. check and ensure that you have adequate clearance around all sides of your case (minimum 2 inches) and that the front fans are blowing air in, and the rear fans are blowing air out. You will need an absolute minimum of 2 120mm fans to keep that video card cool in your average case. more is better.

Just in case you don't already know, to check fan flow direction, look for the bracket the rotating part of the fan is attached to. the bracket is always on the rear of the fan, and that is always the side air comes out. If you have one of the fans swapped, you can set up an odd pressure situation and end up with almost no airflow over critical components.

The other thing you might be running into here is a card with a bad component in the voltage regulator that is needlessly overheating. Rare, but could happen.