CPU Fan Question

[Salahuddin]

My system is up and running quite well and everything is at stock speeds. I notice when I'm gaming, my BFG GeForce 7800 GTX cards in SLI hit temps around 85C (the maximum I ever recorded was 87C), which apparently is what I should expect for air cooling from what I've read. A minor problem, however, is that I notice that my CPU fan kicks in and out of full speed at that temperature (in SLI only)... such that after gaming for a while, I just keep hearing my fan rev up and slow down, rev up and slow down... during the entire time I'm playing.

My BIOS is set at default which tells my CPU fan to kick in at full at 50C. I'm thinking of just setting this to a lower temperature so my fan is ALWAYS at full speed while gaming. Before I do this, I wanted to double check if this is a problem and if I should avoid running my CPU fan at full speed for long periods.

[omga14]

you should not have any issues with running the fan 100% of the time. if you continue to have the rev diferentiation in fan speed you might have a fan going out on you. other than temperatures i don't see why the fan would be doing this so full speed always should eliminate the problem. i don't have an SLI setup so i can't say if 85C is normal for an SLI setup but that does seem rather high.

my single overclocked and bios volt modded 6800GT get's 61C max during heavy gaming. over 20C difference has me concerned. is one card running that temp and the other cooler or is it both vid cards?

[bluegreenshxt]

Don't worry about the temps too much. My friend's BFG 6600GT runs at 85-87C underfull load. (It uses a crappy TIM pad) But then it has lifetime warranty, so he ain't worried.

[Salahuddin]

I changed the minimum temperature to run the fan at full speed to 45C and now the CPU fan just runs full speed while gaming.

As for the 7800 GTXs in SLI, according to the reviews I've read their cards have gotten up to around 85C while gaming. I called BFG to double check on this and they said that is fine. If the card gets over around 95C they said you might notice artifacts and damage to the card might happens over 100-110C. The temperature alarm in my device driver is locked in at 115C.

When I was awaiting one of my cards to be RMAd, I was just using one 7800 GTX and temps were around 10-20C lower.

[Zefram]

Anyway did you do any benchmarks? Love to see the scores of your hardwares!

[omga14]

you might consider modding a 120mm fan to blow on the side of both cards for insurance. maybe it's just me.

yes please do some benchies so we can see that POWA!:D