inno3D GTX 970 OC Overheating Fix

[AETAaAS]

The other day I took delivery of a inno3D GTX 970 OC. Main reason I chose this card was it being among the shortest high performance cards I saw on the market (useful for mITX builds ). Unfortunately no reviews were avaliable at the time but how bad could a long standing brand like inno3D be?



After installing the card and booting, I went straight into BF4, pushed the settings to Ultra 1920x1080 and with MSI Afterburner running, went to play starting with Tashgar...



Quickly the temp hit 80, the fans hit a pretty loud 2500RPM and the clock dropped from the turbo limit of 1240 down to 1088. The game went jittery and I was puzzled. Surely this card doesn't run this hot and surely it runs faster than this. But it was late and I called it a day. Repeated it a couple days later and still the same problem.

Then I thought feck it, let's try repasting. Then while it was sitting in the case, I noticed something odd. The card looked bent. I took it out and lo, it was indeed not right.



The problem I found was the black plastic bracket on the end of the HSF assembly. This was pressing up on the metal covers for the DVI sockets.



This was potentially affecting cooling as you can see the paste on one end doesn't seem to have sat close enough to displace it and there is still quite a thick layer there.



Disassembled the card and took that part out. Now it sits much better.





Bonus pics; The contact between the block and the heat pipes.



Whole card heatspreader for various components including the memory.



At the same spot in Tashgar, the card is capable of maintaining its boost frequency, with heavy use and sits below 80. The card is slightly quieter as well as going over 80% fan use seems to throw the card into whirlwind mode. Whereas previously it could barely play normally with low use scenes and etc. without running up against the temp limit, it is pretty reasonable now.



So if you have an inno3D GTX970 OC, you may consider this fix which offers more performance, better cooling and a quieter card. If you were looking at a GTX 970, you may want to think twice about this model.

[deadman74]

Hi there

I have the same card and have found the same problem with overheating. I checked mine to see if it was bent and too be honest it looked it. I removed the heatzink and put new greese. Still i can easily reach 80 degrees playing BF4 on Ultra and will throttle until the fans are atleast at 2k RPM. I see no reason to overclock it as it is. What i was wondering though is if the plastic you say was pushing against the DVi's was cutout somewhat, so i would not touch the DVI's ... as mine was! Yours seems to look the same at all corners? Did you look if in production they switched the ends by mistake? And the cutout corner was at the other end (closer to the 6 pin connectors?

[AETAaAS]

You are right! I went back and had a look, the other black plastic bracket does indeed have what appears to be a cutout. Odd thing is, this heatsink assembly can only go on one way given the power cable for the fans sits to one side. And it doesn't make sense either because the cutout is on the same side which caused the problem in the first place, which means if it was flipped to the other side, it would be in the wrong place.

I am confused but it looks like mine may have been a production error. :S I can't speak for why your card may be overheating if you have a heatsink that sits well on the card.

[deadman74]

I thought this might be the case as soon as i took a look at mine. I'm just wondering if the fans and heatzink are still good enough, i mean if the card is throttling after maybe 2 minutes of 3Dmark, Heaven, Valley and BF4 (at high/Ultra) it would be the case! Does yours not go to 80 very quickly playing BF4 at Ultra (1080P and a ok ventilated case) ?

Mine idles at around 46-50.

Is it possible for you to post MSi Afterburner Fan Speed, Tachometer, GPU usage and Temp while running Unique Valley and or Heaven at highest settings. If i do that with my card it reaches 80 degrees very quickly and throttles down to around 1100Mhz (from 1266mhz). I find that as a huge production problem if that is the case for all Inno3d cards as i know MSI and Gigabyte don't throttle even with higher overclock.

Thx in advance as it's really hard to find a Inno3D 970GTX review or even an owner

[AETAaAS]

I have a feeling it might be your room temperature or your case ventilation. My case is a EVGA Hadron Air, not the best ventilation but ok.

My idle is 27*C. So your idle looks pretty high to me. Are you using stock clocks and voltages? You may have a poor quality card. :S And what thermal paste did you repaste with?

[deadman74]

Actually i've re-paste it twice now with different paste each time. It's not high quality paste, but it's ok Cooler Master HTK-002 paste. And i know the amount, just a mid size drop. Still it never idled close to 27* lowest i've seen it is 37 maybe just for a few seconds after i've turned it on. It never went as low as yours for sure, with the factory paste, and it's at stock everything.

I have a Corsair 330R, it's mid sized, silent case, but with custom Corsair cooling i've added and a H60 Corsair water cooled CPU so that's not warming the case to much.

The 74% fan speed you post in your picture is a higher % than the card goes at default right, so you've created a custom profile in Afterburner?

Maybe i should try to have it returned as it's only performing around 80% like this.

[deadman74]

4th post to post urls

[deadman74]

5th post to be able to post urls :/

[deadman74]

My plastic is fine, it's the board that seems all bend. I just can't beleve that the cooling isn't better than the picture below shows. Benchmarking Heaven in Ultra settings, it takes only around 40 seconds for it to reach 80* and too throttle. I can play BF4 ok on a mixture of low's to highs @ ~70*, but at high and Ultra settings it will Throttle quickly. Unfortunatly i can't post this on Overclockers.co.uk forums were you post your problem also as it takes ages for them to accept a new user. I'd love to see someone else confirm it's my card only, and others can atleast finish a Heaven Bench without throttle. Mind you i can if i turn the fan's to 100% but only slightly?

[Agent]

Why mod it and void the warranty? If this happens, just send it back, it's clearly faulty.

[sula]

Why mod it and void the warranty? If this happens, just send it back, it's clearly faulty.

Agreed. I have a hard time believing that this kind of issue is design error, you propably just got an unit with a fault, undiscovered by Q&A. I would resend it on warranty, since it's an easy fix you would propably get it back quickly.

[Bobbler]

Agreed. I have a hard time believing that this kind of issue is design error, you propably just got an unit with a fault, undiscovered by Q&A. I would resend it on warranty, since it's an easy fix you would propably get it back quickly.

I don't post here often (understatement!), but thought I would chime in as two of these cards are sat in front of me right now having arrived today.

There was no need to remove the entire cooler to fix this issue, his card has been sent with the black plastic shrouds on the wrong ends.
It's two seconds with the included allen key to undo them and reverse them to correct it. No warranty violation, no paste to mess about with, well unless you want to, I would imagine it would just sort itself out once the springs of the cooler can get it into position properly on the GPU die.