Crossfire Heat Issues

[shykage]

Hello everyone I just built my computer for the first time a couple of months ago and so far everything has been good until I purchased another AMD Asus HD 6970 to run in crossfire. I mainly game on my computer and have no problems playing for hours on non demanding games like League of Legends but when playing BattleField 3 beta and Oblivion all on max settings I can't play for more than 10 minutes without having my system crash on me.

When I disable crossfire and tone down the graphic settings I can play for hours without any crashes. Since I'm a first time computer builder I'm not sure exactly how I can fix this overheating issue.

My case is a haf x full tower case with a 230mm front, 140mm Rear, 200mm top, 200mm side fans. I was planning on getting another 200mm 700rpm fan on the top of my case for exhaust but I don't think that would really help me out. Also my cards aren't sandwiched on top of each other so there's room in between the two cards to fit another one.

Full system specs if it helps:
i7 980x cpu
Asus Rampage 3 Extreme mobo
HAF X Case (230mm front, 140mm Rear, 200mm top, 200mm side fans)
2x Asus HD 6970s
Corsair Performance 160GB SSD
Western Digital Black 1TB 7200 RPM HD
Corsair AX1200 PSU

Any help/suggestions would be much appreciated.

 

[purple stain]

Don't count BF3 Beta as something to base this off of.That game is filled with many errors.

I would suspect that the GPU's aren't getting enough voltage or the clocks are to high.Try running them in crossfire and reducing the clock speeds.

What are your temps?

 

[wa1]

Agree with purple stank above, if the other games are fine then don't worry about it...

 

[thrakazog]

With crossfire you can run into a problem where, with graphically intense games although you still get great frame rates, the higher FPS causes your GPU's to heat up much quicker. Normally, just enabling v-sync fixes this by capping your FPS at 60 (assuming that's your monitors refresh rate) and limiting the extra gpu work on higher frame rates. I played BF3 beta with 2 x 6950's in X-fire. I was getting 100+ fps, but also had my gpu fans working overtime. I enabled v-sync, only to discover it didn't actually work in beta. So like the previous posters stated, don't worry about it with BF3 beta. Things should work much better on final release.

 

[Virace]

I had the exact same issue with a couple of 6870 on a Rampage II extreme main-board. Even a maxi tower Obsidian 800D combined with 3 x 140 mm and 4 x 120 mm Noctua fans didn't have enough Airflow to combat the huge overheating generated by the graphic cards. They are just sitting to close together.

Just ordered a new 107mm crosslink and I'll try to space out the cards by using a PCIe slot further away.