“For a 20-minute project with a $35 bracket, that’s not bad.” “I saw significant reduction in heat and noise by going with liquid, and none of the throttling I saw on air cooling,” hardware editor Gordon Mah Ung wrote after using a Corsair bracket to attach a CPU closed-loop liquid cooler to a reference Radeon R9 290.

We’ve got a guide to water-cooling your GPU, and hot-running enthusiasts with nothing to lose might find the upgrade worthwhile. If you really wanted to get adventurous in your quest for lower temperatures, you could swap out your graphics card’s cooling system for a liquid-cooling option while you’ve got it disassembled, though it’s overkill for most people. Our guide to making your old graphics card run like new is several years old, but the basic technique still applies to today’s GPUs. You could try to replace it if all else fails, though the process is highly technical, varies card-by-card, and voids the hell out of your warranty. And sometimes, graphics cards ship with poor thermal paste application, though it’s very rare. Custom graphics cards with multiple fans often hover in the 60s and 70s, even under full load, and water-cooled GPUs can run even cooler.įinally, sometimes the thermal paste between the GPU and the heatsink can become dry and lose its effectiveness, most commonly in graphics cards that are many years old. In single-GPU systems with decent airflow, your graphics card temperatures shouldn’t wander above the 80-degree range unless you’re using a model with a single blower-style cooler, or an exceptionally powerful GPU.

In desktops, however, a graphics card running at 90-plus degrees is screaming for help. Most modern chips can run at temperatures in the mid-90 degrees Celsius, though, and you’ll often see them hit those temperatures in gaming laptops. There’s no easy answer it varies from GPU to GPU. So now you know what tools can help you monitor your graphics card temperature, but numbers on a screen mean nothing without context. It offers a clean, straightforward aesthetic and a handy mobile app for remote monitoring, but you’ll need to create an account to use CAM. If the sparse, information-dense look of those enthusiast-focused apps don’t work for you, NZXT’s superb CAM software performs the same task, even if you don’t have any NZXT hardware in your PC. HWInfo’s sensor info includes GPU temperatures and a lot more.

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