crossfire overheat risk? EX58-UD5

[fill_d]

Hi I've got a gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard with two Sapphire HD4870 toxic graphic cards. In order to put them both in PCIe x16 slots they are virtually touching. I just tested it playing crysis on all high settings for 15mins then quit and temp of one card was 90degrees- there is no gap above the fan on one card.  Question is, should I put one card in the x8 slot which would improve airflow? How will this effect the benefit of crossfire setup?  If I continue with current setup will it damage the card? Thanks for reading

[Badbonji]

These are PCI-e 2.0, so a 8x is equivalent of a 16x PCI-e 1.1, so that will be fine.
You can also manually increase the fan speed on RivaTuner. GPU's run alot hotter than cpu's, and 90C isn't as bad as you think. I believe the 8x slot however will not give any performance drop at all.

[oggmonster]

Yeah, like Badbonji said 90c isn't too bad for a stressed graphics card. If you were going to put the other card in the 8x slot you could run benchmark tests and the crysis benchmark. But as been mentioned you probably wont see any performance drop, if you do it will be very minimal.

[fill_d]

thanks for help, I'll try moving it to the 8x slot- will make me feel happier anyway!

[fill_d]

damn, isnt room past the 8x slot for the card housing so i'm stuck with one hot card it looks like (or no crossfire)

[Pottypete]

Hi,
http://www.virtual-hideout.net/reviews/Antec_SpotCool/index.shtml
Flexible cooling fan,
Or a case fan mounted on the side panel, blowing directly onto cards

[oggmonster]

What case do you have? A good case with cable management and optimum airflow will always help temps. Something like http://www.giga-byte.co.uk/Products/Chassis/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=2591 would be ideal. It has cable management + has 2 rear and 1 front fan

[Badbonji]

You can ass a 120MM fan on the side of the cards, these are dual slot right?
you can always change the fan speed manually in CCC or a programme such as Rivatuner. If it gets hot in other games then Vsync helps alot, like on my GTX295 it gets 70C in games like HL2 with 100% fan speed, overclocked but without Vsync it can reach 95C... (FPS up to 300)