I’m concerned since my 2080ti is idling at 58c. I have that intake right next to an exhaust and I’m not sure.
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Two observations:
- Your fan layout in your case is not optimal.
- Your GPU idle is high, but not dangerous.
Fan layout in a PC is very straightforward - cold air in, hot air out. You want the airflow to be constantly moving and not choking. So first off, good on you for trying to balance the count of intake fans vs count of exhaust fans. I noticed in your observations that you’re wondering if your exhaust fan is detrimental - you are correct. The problem is that you are exhausting cold air before it even reaches your PC components. A common problem I see with inexperienced builders is that they try to fill as many slots as they can with fans. More fans doesn’t equal more cooling. Remove the top exhaust fan that is closest to the front intake (i.e., the top right exhaust fan as it is exhausting cold air). For your last top exhaust fan, move it as far left as you can (so it sits in the top left corner of your case, basically behind your CPU cooler). With this adjustment, cold air goes in and actually gets to reach your CPU cooler, and then all the hot waste air is optimally pulled out of the top left corner of your case (via both the rear case fan and the top exhaust fan).
For your GPU, based on reviewing your comments in this post, I assume you’re probably an inexperienced/new PC gamer. And that’s totally fine of course. Thermal Junction temperature of a GPU is generally certified by the manufacturer to reach 100-110 C. This of course is entirely dependent on the manufacturer, so check your GPU make/model, go to their web site, and look at the certified operating temperatures. Ideally, keep the hottest point of the card much colder than that. If your GPU is idling at 58, start by increasing your fan curves for your GPU. In general, you want more fan speed for higher load. Do your best to try to target ~70-75 F when doing heavy gaming (gpu temp 70-75 F, Tjunction and mem < 90 F) depending on the games you play.
My recommendations:
- Inspect your GPU for wear/issues.
- Clean your PC from dust. Blow canned air (or get a computer duster) through the GPU fans and heatsink and try to get rid of as much dust as possible. If you use a computer duster, make sure to hold the fans still as you blow through them, or else you can make them spin faster than the bearings can handle, which will damage the fans.
- Set a proper GPU fan curve to balance noise and cooling.
- It’s okay for your card to get hot as these cards can go up to 100 F, but it is ideal for longevity to keep it much cooler
- Optimise your case fans to have curves. Ideally, bind the case fans to the GPU so that when the GPU ramps up, the case fans ramp up too. If for any reason you can’t bind your case fans to the GPU, instead whenever you play an intensive game, just manually increase the fan speed to something like 1200 rpm just to bring more air in). Ideally for noise and airflow when doing general computing, your case fans don’t need to spin fast at all - I keep mine around 700 rpm.
- Balance your case fan speeds to match 1:1. In my above recommendation, you eliminate one exhaust fan so you are left with 2 exhaust and 3 intake. That’s okay. The ideal for case airflow is neutral air pressure (the same amount of air brought in will leave the case at the same rate), but the alternative less-ideal situation is positive air pressure (air comes in faster than you can exhaust it). However, be careful when balancing positive airpressure airflow. If you have way too much air coming in (e.g., 2000 rpm intake fans running at 100%) vs being exhausted (e.g., exhausting at 20% fan speed), you end up hurting airflow. What happens is you ram too much into the computer, and it has nowhere to go because the exhaust fans can’t keep up with how much is coming in. Eventually, the hot waste air from your PC components ends up getting mixed in with the cool air over time, and you end up with a hot box. Eliminate this problem by having the exhaust fans run at the same speed as your intake fans - always.
- And finally, make sure you have an airflow-friendly case. I don’t know what case you’re using, but as long as it’s not a bad case with filters or obstructions that choke airflow, you should be good. I’ve been using a Corsair 5000d airflow for several years now, but there are much newer cases that are better for airflow.
When you become more advanced:
- Do not do this part until you have experience and know-how!
- Disassemble your GPU, repaste it, and consider replacing the thermal pads if they’re worn.
Thank you for the thorough response.
While I’ve been building computers since the original i3/5/7 series, I have always had full sized cases, or obscure goofy cooler master cube cases. This is my first tiny case that isnt something like a split ITX SFF case, and I have to actually thing about airflow. I had strong thoughts that the front top two corner fans were causing dead air pockets, my CPU cooler was ripping at higher RPM once the machine started going, and it almost seemed like the 2080 was exhausting right into the CPU cooler to eject out instead of being whisked out.
The GPU, I may have misrepresented myself once again. But this is my first time with an 80 series card, or any kind in its class. First thing I did when I got this card was thermal paste, I haven’t undervolted yet, and really until I figure out this airflow situation I believe overclocking is going to be met with thermal throttles before I get anywhere close to gains. Im hitting thermal throttle at 85c (for some reason NVIDIA experience arbitrarily set that?) Riva Turner shows relatively okay speeds, and load, but I cant get rid of that heat!
Your recommendations:
- This is a brand new PC (2080ti used) Ryzen 5700x, 32gb, 2080ti - No dust in sight…yet.
- Im thinking of 90mm fan swapping this 2080ti, the fans I have on this are loud under load. But the curve I have on it now I think is just dumping air into the chassis.
- I’m thermal throttling at 85c right now.
- “Bind the case fans to GPU” - okay so for this one, in my BIOS I don’t directly see PCIE, or GPU to bind fans to, but I can see CPU, VRMMOS, SYS_FAN, and SYSTEM1. I am assuming VRM_MOS is the motherboards not the PCIE’s? Gigabyte mobo.
(Already replaced thermal paste with arctic 5, that’s my go to. Also, a lot of fans now adays have resistors to prevent current from going back to the mobo if you get your fan going to fast.)
Previous builds, all with goofy, non standard cases: (Bunch of laptops, and USFF Dells) 8500/RX580 4770/1060 4690/R9 380 3770k/R9 290 970/GTX970
Thanks for the response! It was hard to gauge your level of technical ability as I was going off on the other comments and made a dumb assumption. :) My mistake and apologies if any offense as they were purely innocuous comments.
Since only the GPU is used in that build, thermalpaste was the way to go for sure. I assume you also cleaned it and inspected the thermal pads so rule out all that stuff. I never owned an rtx20 series (only gtx 10, rtx 30, and now i’m on AMD) so I don’t have firsthand experience with how they handle or if they run really hot all the time. Nothing else should be a factor here apart from getting rid of that top exhaust fan I talked about and moving your top exhaust fan further to the left.
GPU fan swap is always great - if you have no qualms with doing it, go for it and swap out to more performant fans that are less noisy. Undervolting is a free option. I only know how to undervolt on Windows since it’s stupid easy using MSI Afterburner, but I’m on Linux Mint now for a few months and I haven’t even explored that yet as a possibility for my RX 7900XTX.
For binding case fans to the GPU, some motherboards don’t come with that capability. I haven’t seen it in the one gigabyte board I’ve had, and I’m currently on an MSI X670e (I think that’s the model) and I don’t have that option to do it there. On Windows, you could download Fan Control and configure it in the app so the case fans will ramp up with the GPU load. On Linux, no idea - when I game, I just ramp up my case fans manually.
Something also popped in my head I didn’t think about. You may also want to benchmark your GPU and compare it to others in its class, this way you can get a rough idea of how the hardware is still performing.
Edit: fixed some typos as I’m on mobile
When did you last repaste your GPU? it is a good practice to clean and repaste your CPU/GPU regularly (once a year or so).
TBH I wouldn’t recommend this one blindly. Sure it would help but it depends on the skills, used paste and circumstances. Under “normal” use with a branded thermal paste the intervals should be somewhere between 4 and 5 years. If the CPU and GPU are cooking the whole time then yeah, 1 to 2 years. But even then, if you’re not a little bit tech savvy, impatient and cautious you can mess up pretty badly…
Oh I just got this 2080ti so maybe about a week ago!
What’s the thing between the PSU and the GPU?
And what’s the orientation of the fans?The main question is: does your GPU have a no fan idle mode? AFAIK the fans won’t spin till the GPU reaches 60°C and cool it back down to 40 or 45, sorry can’t remember.
Usually you want to have a 3 intake at the front panel and 2 exhausts, one at the back inline with the CPU cooler and one at the top as far behind as possible. Since you’re running, what looks like, a mini tower you can with the same layout as a midi but 2+2 (2 intake front, 1 exhaust back, 1 exhaust top far behind). For a positive pressure you can mount an additional fan on top, at the front as an intake.
For the best result you should take your time and fiddle around, measure and document
That thing is a 3d printed anti sag brick lol.
The GPU fans spin around 55ish.
Oh! So if I flip the top front fan around it’ll work out better? Or should I just take that one off entirely?
I want all the fans filled if I could. But I’m okay even 3d printing air guides to move air along or prevent it from getting in specific places.
The anti sag brick looks nice but is restricting airflow from the side, if you can look for a stand for the corner of the GPU.
You don’t have to populate all available fan slots. I would recommend you to remove the bottom one entirely, even if your PC is on top of a table and dust isn’t a problem, this fan redirects a lot of the air, coming from the front 2, slightly up to the CPU.
The problem with the top one is, even if you rotate it to be an intake, it could push the air, coming from the front, down away from the CPU flow.
Short: try and simply remove the bottom and the top front one entirely.
Like someone already stated, you want the air to move linearly from one side to another.
I don’t recommend to use air guides since they can create pressure points and block other components. Components like RAM, VRMs and drives also need some fresh air.
Yea I guess you’re right about the anti sag brick. But it does have a bunch of speed holes in it I thought would be enough. I really don’t like the column antisag methods.
Ill disconnect the fans you all have recommended and report back.
Thanks this is my first small case like this. Usually I either have a big fuck all case or one of those mini ITX cases that you put the GPU on the back side of the mobo.
The trick with cooling is to ensure you have a smooth flow of air from one part of the case to the other, preferably opposite sides. Make sure your CPU coolers are blowing in the same direction as well.
It’s a little difficult to see from this image, but it looks like you have almost all your fans - intake and outlet - on one end of the case. This could create a big dead zone at the rear of your case. Especially for your GPU, sandwiched between CPU cooler and PSU. What I would do is move one or more of those fans to the rear, make sure front, rear, and CPU fans are all blowing in the same direction, and see if that helps any.
That thing on the GPU is a anti sag bar I printed it. Front and bottom are intake. Top and back are exhaust. Everything is supposed to be going front to back. I think the top corner fans are creating a dead zone.
I can rearrange my fans to see if that helps. It’s a small case so not many options for configuration.
I have 3 exhaust. (2 top 1 back) And 3 intake 1 bottom 2 front.
That’s kinda what I’m concerned about is the dead air
You need a 6th fan /s
Hmmm…yes. Maybe I could mount some 10mm raspberry pi fans in some spare gaps
IANA science person or wind expert, but I would test what effect removing/disabling the bottom intake has. Right now it could be pushing fresh air up and diverting it somewhat before it gets to the GPU intake (hard to say for sure based on just the 1 photo)
85 thermal throttle on 2080ti
