asus poseidon GTX 1080 Ti Water-cooled 65 degrees with fans on

[marcelmaria]

Dear medeforum lovers.

I have been in possession of the asus poseidon GTX 1080Ti for a couple of weeks. The video card is water-cooled naturally: D The card will be max 65 degrees only the fans will also turn around. This does not seem to me if the video card is water-cooled seems to me. Is this normal or I have a broken card?

[marcelmaria]

Nobody ?

[JustinThyme]

This card hitting 65 is not out of the norm. I just did a lot of research and turned this card down because of thermals. If you research the pro reviewers they all had loaded temps up in the 70-75C range. While this is a nice alternative for those who don't wish to embark on imstallling a proper water block it's hybrid operation is just not the same. The liquid cooling happens by tubing passing through the air heat sink like a heat pipe and doesn't come close to a dedicated water block which is what I was hoping for with this release. *It also is quite restrictive on flow rates. While I already have two 1080 strix cards with bitspower blocks that run quite nicely( these will be put up for sale with original heat sinks included) I just had to go for a pair of 1080ti OC cards with EK blocks. Many have had no issues getting close to 2100 MHz and never passing 45C.*

[garry81]

At the moment, there is a defect in the assembly (it seems to me). The far edge of the card (the one where the fans and the rgb ribbons) is clearly sagging, when the map is leveled to the horizontal position (the tools at hand, the tree), we get temperatures around 50, which is basically normal. What exactly is wrong, I can not say. I do not know what the problem is, to open the card without breaking the seals in any way, maybe the thermal sensor is not working correctly. What do you say to this?

[j0shm1lls]

garry81 wrote:
At the moment, there is a defect in the assembly (it seems to me). The far edge of the card (the one where the fans and the rgb ribbons) is clearly sagging, when the map is leveled to the horizontal position (the tools at hand, the tree), we get temperatures around 50, which is basically normal. What exactly is wrong, I can not say. I do not know what the problem is, to open the card without breaking the seals in any way, maybe the thermal sensor is not working correctly. What do you say to this?

I've also noticed this extreme sag - It is in fact the cause of the card getting too hot as when I brace it up so that there is no sag the temps stay nice and cool. Remove the brace and I'm back up 80+. I JUST bought this card and I'm very disappointed in the defect.

[Matthew_George]

I have this same issue??? I just got my Poseidon 1080 ti yesterday and ran it on air before putting in my water loop. On air I thought I was getting really hot as far as the sensed temperatures were concerned and then today I got it all installed into my loop and the same issue, it runs right up to 70-80c but now I can tell the card is running really cool because to the touch on the back plate it's cool... 😉 However I then ran across this thread and thought, no way... lift the end of the card up??? Well bingo... I lift the end of the card up and put a support on it and the temps drop right down into the low 50's. Here is a picture... of my solution to my new $860 Asus Geforce GTX 1080 ti Poseidon. Sheesh... use a nut driver and some paper towels to get the card to read the real tempuratures. 🙂 Give me a break... Has anyone heard of a solution? I haven't contacted Asus support yet. 😞 mg

[MasterC]

With a good liquid-cooling solution, the temp should stay under 55 degrees and the fans won't spin. The fans operate just the same since the Poseidon is able to run air-cooled as well.

We will look into the sag issue you guys mentioned.

[Matthew_George]

i figured out exactly what is causing this issue. What is happening is that the thermal tape / foam between the pcb and the heatsink / waterblock is so thick and stiff that the springs in the 4 screwed around the GPU are allowing the GPU to separate from the copper heat sink (in the case of the poseidon). This explains exactly what is going on. You put the card in and it heats up much hotter that you think it should but in reality it's actually that hot because GPU is only partially touching the heat sink. If you lift the card up and or help the heat sink buy manually pushing it in to the GPU, you can watch the temps drop drastically in real time... i.e. while a furmark bench mark is running. I have demonstrated this on water and off water just on air as I was trying to diagnose this. If your card is having this issue you can even see the gap from looking under the card where the gpu is and you can see the gap that is between the heat sink and the gpu by using a flast light. You can see the stand offs on the heat sink / water block assembly about 1/16 of an inch in my case.

The solution for me (which required me to remove the sticker and likely void my warranty, was to take the 4 screws out around the gpu and install small metal washers so the springs would be compressed much tighter and keep the heat sink compressed against the gpu. This solves the issue completely! With the washers I used, the pcb is now nice and tight against the heat sink / cooling block. HUGE difference. The only concern I would have is that there really isn't much give in the springs, so the heat sink is really compressed onto the gpu now. Which improves cooling even more, but I'm a bit worried about the design on gpu's where it's designed to give a little.

I was not thrilled about sending my card in over this issue and I'm glad I resolved it. However, if I needed to send the card in for warranty issues unrelated to this, I suspect I would be out of luck.

ASUS really needs to look at this design based on the thickness of the thermal tape.. the tape appears to be quality, but it totally negates the ability of the heat sink to cool the gpu, especially when the card is mounted horizontal in a typical case and pcie slot. The weight of the heat sink and card being under the pcb and gpu put more force on the springs that are trying to hold everything together and keep the heat sink in contact with the GPU. Again, my solution was to drop in washers on all 4 main GPU screws under the springs on each screw. I actually used two washers that fit perfectly. The screws really compress the springs flat and pull the pcb / GPU right together. There is no way the springs can give and allow the heat sink to sag off the GPU now.

I hope this helps someone else out... mg

[Huigie]

Matthew George wrote:

The solution for me (which required me to remove the sticker and likely void my warranty, was to take the 4 screws out around the gpu and install small metal washers...

Did this today, f*ck warranty. Without overclocking the card was clocking down after a while, the top plate was barely warm to the touch so I removed the screws, placed some plastic washers and boom, 5 degrees lower than before and no more clocking down. Top plate gets nice and toasty now. :cool:

[MasterC]

The samples we have appear to be fine. Looks like we have 3 cases here, but we will investigate if more are affected during production. In case anyone else is having this issue, just tightening the screws is a minor thing, but due to the warranty sticker - best to RMA.

Another option is to invest in a vga holder which prevents sag:
https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessory/VGA-HOLDER/

[Matthew_George]

As a follow up, I installed the 1080 ti Poseidon back in my loop this evening after adding the washers and replacing the TIM. I used a thin layer of Kryonaut after cleaning off the GPU. I also added an additional washer to all the screws on the back plate to tighten up the binding of the PCB to the heat sink / water block. I really like the way everything is nice and tight against the PCB and there is far less sag in the board when installed.

I ran a 15 minute 1024x768 burn in test with FurMark and you can see the results below... this is with the stock over clock set on the 1080 ti Poseidon. I didn't even hit 50c until about 10 minutes in. The test cranked through over 250,000 frames in 15 minutes at 1024x768 with an average of 263 frames per second. This is impressive on the temperature only touching 51c at the end of the test. I'm running a 5 year old EK setup with a 360 radiator and Standard EK RES X3 reservoir. I'm a very happy camper now! Well worth the addition of the washers under all the springs... the TIM replacement wasn't even required, but at this point I thought I would get it done having removed the sticker to put the washers under the springs. See the image of the FurMark run below... ASUS really needs to consider putting on stronger springs and or shorter screws to hold the water block / heat sink nice and tight up against the GPU etc... or don't use as thick thermal tape on the memory chips etc... I still believe the thick thermal tape is the culprit causing the issue more than anything. mg