Any Graphics card gurus out there?
 

I'm running two GTX 560 (sometimes SLI sometimes as a single) graphics cards and have been tinkering around with them with MSI Afterburner. For being a life time gamer I'm just now learning the ins and outs of trying to figure out what everything means. Long story short, after hooking up MSI afterburner to monitor in game Framrates, temps and speeds I noticed that with SH5 my temps jump waaaay up around 99 C when running any screen other than the Navigation screen. This seems way high as most people say they don't really like running above 80 C for longevity of their equipment. I'd like to be one of those people. So how do I do this? I've already tweaked my computer for gaming by doing a bunch of changes in Windows. The reason I started looking at graphics performance was that my GPU fan was spooling like a jet engine and very annoying (its trying to tell me something) which hadn't happened before. I've cleaned my computer box lately and made sure there is enough airflow. I've only tried turning off Vsync and lowering the shadows in the game. Any pointers?

WOW what a difference. So for anyone getting degraded performance..you might want to actually take your card out and apart to clean it.

Basically I did two things. 1. took out my slot one graphics card. Dismantled it and used my air compressor to clean it. Before ever doing this the most I would do would be blowing compressed air onto different components. I'd hold the fans so they didnt spin and I'd just blow until the dust was gone. But man oh man once I took that first one apart I found a layer of dust caked on the front of the heat sink where the fan blows (at least 2 mm thick) air into it.

2. I took out the second graphics card and put the first one (clean) into the second slot. I fired it up to see if I got any results.

pre cleaning with both Cards in: Idle temp 56C, under SH5 load 95-99C

Post cleaning main card in second slot: Idle temp 25C, under SH5 Load 59-63 C

:o

Wow!

So clean those parts!

most people just never understand the amount of "hidden" dust in heatsink fins.

glad you got it sorted out now and its a good idea to remove the heat sink completely at least once after 2-3 years and replace the thermal paste on them since most factory paste isn't as good as what you can buy yourself.

also, the film of dust you see on fan blades can easily add 2-3 degrees running temps to it in lost airflow due to turbulence caused by the rough blade surface

Thanks! I saw some youtubers putting the paste on...so I guess I'll do that next time.