Crossfire Slave Gpu running hot compared to master.

Alright, so my 4870 slave is running a good 10-12 Degrees Celsius hotter than my master card.

It's been like this for a while, but now it's starting to bug me. I first noticed this after I reassembled my laptop after it had been taken apart for nearly 2 months. (I've checked to make sure the fans/vents are dust free and that hte heatsink is mounted properly.) Prior to that, both cards were within 1-2 degrees of each other for the most part.

I thought it might have been because of my overclock (an increase of 150mhz), but it's not. I set it to stock speeds, and that 10-12 degree discrepancy is still there.

Anyone have any ideas? I've used riva tuner and gpu-z to monitor the temps and they are displaying the same results. Think the thermal paste is bad on the slave?

Btw I am using custom vbios's - and both cards are overvolted.

 

If this occured after a reassembly then yes I would blame my paste job and redo it to be sure. 10 degrees is a big jump though.

 

The thing is I never re-pasted it. The cards were out of the machine for nearly two months in a protected enclosure. I never took the heat-sinks off. I'll try a repaste anyway, but it's a bit of a project. Any other ideas before I take this thing apart again?

 

Where the heat sinks removed from the cards? I know some of these setups have them attached to the card where they can still be removed without taking them off. If you removed the heatsink/pipe from the card it should have been repasted.

There is now telling how badly the paste is sitting when you just slap it back on. Doing that is the same as doing a horrible paste job in the first place most of the time.

 

No, like I said the heatsinks were not removed from the cards. In the M17x you can remove the cards without taking the heatsinks off them.

 

I seem to have missed that, then yeah I wouldn't blame em on that note. Shoot I haven't looked at the M17x chassis since it came out, just wondering if their are any points in the cooling system that might help/hurt. But as you said everything's in properly.

Yeah whats funny is despite what i did read i missed alot.

 

i dont have that large of a difference in temps, but my slave card usually runs 3-5C hotter. I've re pasted more than once. That just seems to be how it goes.

 

I don't know if this is a issue with just the 4870 video cards but my 5870 are usually very close and load and at idle the slave is usually lower than the master.