Temperature Air Flow when running GTX 660 SLI

I have had a couple of air cooled crossfire and SLI rigs, the cards lifespan has been impacted due to excessive heat in all of them.
I now have 2 x H60 watercoolers cooling my GTX570 in SLI because the top card was getting so hot, i wouldn't recommend this either though as it's a massive risky pain in the arse to install water cooling on graphics cards.
I think single card is always the best value for money, quietest and the cards last longer, in your situation I would think about ebaying my 660 and getting a 7 series card when you need a performance bump.

Lakristian said:Jamie Gilbert said:I have had a couple of air cooled crossfire and SLI rigs, the cards lifespan has been impacted due to excessive heat in all of them.
I now have 2 x H60 watercoolers cooling my GTX570 in SLI because the top card was getting so hot, i wouldn't recommend this either though as it's a massive risky pain in the arse to install water cooling on graphics cards.
I think single card is always the best value for money, quietest and the cards last longer, in your situation I would think about ebaying my 660 and getting a 7 series card when you need a performance bump.

Thanks this was exactly the kind of info I needed! I guess it'll be a upgrade in card instead.
However my GTX 660 still run the new games on high or highest setting with a fine framerate.

I haven't even checked out the 7 series yet so I better do that.

Thanks alot,



Well, I will throw in my two cents worth. I am running two 660's in SLI right now. Both are EVGA SuperClocked versions. My case is a CM Storm Sniper. When I first fired up the cards I was concerned about the temps also; previous SLI was 2 GTX460's and they ran a lot cooler. A call to EVGA ended my worries; the 660 has a max temp of 95 degrees C and anything under that should be o.k.
Under really hard DX11 gaming I have seen 85* on my top card and 79* on the lower (Metro2033, BF3). The fans on my cards spin up to a noticeable db level, but they exhaust the heat out of the case, which is what I wanted. My prior setup sent the hot air out the back AND into the case and was quieter. You would want to match the air flow of any new card to that of your current card.
If you are not using a side fan on your 302, it will be worth the ~$16 to put one in, and if possible a front fan.
Jamie is correct, it is always simpler, easier and safer to go with a single card solution.
But you already have one card and you will gain some serious performance by adding another. Using FRAPS I have benchmarked my setup several times and, just like 460''s in SLI beating a 480, my two 660's run most everything I play better then the published benchmarks of a 680. (Note: If perchance you play RAGE, it does NOT support SLI and runs faster on 1 GPU then on 2 - I forced SLI through the control panel and it ran very badly).
I have been running SLI since 2006 (7900's, 8800's, 9800's, 460's). I have had cards go bad (let me know if you want specifics) but cannot or have never been able to say it was because of my setup. And when one card went bad, the PC wasn't dead as I already had a working card to keep it going until a replacement arrived.
Sorry for the long rambling post, I hope this helps.

On all my SLi rigs the temp increase when going from one card to two has been minimal (less than 10c) all those going on about massive temp increases are just showing that they know nothing about multi GPU setups IMHO.

Just to add, @full load (F@H) both of my 660Ti's sit at 71c and the fan profiles are on auto so the fans are at about 45% of their capable speeds.

Hi Guys,
Just wanted to clarify, when I said running SLI / Crossfire rigs has impacted the life of my card, it was never due to the GPU core temperature.
In an SLI / Crossfire situation the whole board runs hotter, especially the top card, the top card fan bearings and VRM components are much more prone to failure in this configuration.
For example, I had 2 x 2900XT in an Antec 900 case with an Antec 850W power supply and lots of very powerful air cooling, the top card died 1 year before the bottom card due to excessive heat, it was not the core temperature as this was fine, however it was a smaller component on the board that died.
Cheers,
J