How well would a non reference card paired with a reference card In crossfire/sli?

[wombinator04]

I've been hearing people say that reference cards In a dual gpu solution(crossfire/sli) Is a bad choice because reference cards don't blow air of out the back, the hot air goes In your case. Then pair 2 of those together and you got a major a temperature problem.
Right now I have a 6870 nonreference card that averages about 70c-80c. But there's a MSI twin frozr iii on sale. The MSI twin frozr iii Is a non reference design.
So what If I was to put a non reference card with a reference card In crossfire. How well Is that going to work? Temperature wise.
Also would It work better If the reference card was on top of the nonreference card?

[noteworthynerd]

I'm fairly certain that's backwards... Reference cards do blow air out the back, while non-reference cards just worry about getting the hot air away from the card and rely on your case cooling to get it out.

Regarding Crossfire: As long as they are the same cards with the same VRAM and clock speed, they can be SLI'd.

[wombinator04]

I'm fairly certain that's backwards... Reference cards do blow air out the back, while non-reference cards just worry about getting the hot air away from the card and rely on your case cooling to get it out.

Regarding SLI: As long as they are the same cards with the same VRAM and clock speed, they can be SLI'd.

Lmao another mistake I made. But how well would It work temperature wise? Like having the nonreference on the top of the reference card.

[noteworthynerd]

If you put the reference card on the top, and the Twin Frozr on the bottom, and you have good case airflow, you'll be fine, assuming there is good spacing between the two cards.

[vesseblah]

Usually with two identical non-reference cards you see "normal temperature" card and "normal +10C" cards with SLI/Crossfire. So you'd be looking at running other card at 75-85 and the new card with better cooler maybe 10-20C less.

[Wries]

I'd rather put the reference as the bottom card since its hot air will go out of the case instead of rising upwards to the top card.

The twin frozr being the bottom card would in theory feed the reference card with hot air thus not making much difference vs two non-reference cards.

[wombinator04]

I'd rather put the reference as the bottom card since its hot air will go out of the case instead of rising upwards to the top card.

The twin frozr being the bottom card would in theory feed the reference card with hot air thus not making much difference vs two non-reference cards.

Yeah I was reading that I was like wtf, lol. But yeah thanks for the replies.

[noteworthynerd]

I said reference on top because the Twin Frozr card will be pushing hot air onto the bottom card, even if hot air rises, it doesn't rise immediately after it leaves the card.

[Drunkenvalley]

Indeed. Air of most temperatures is so light and fickle that mostly every force will throw it about.

[Drunkenvalley]

This applies to almost all cards, but it's worse with ATI due to their design of having no venting on the end of the card where the power connectors plug in.

I don't know about previous ones, nor about all of the new 7000 series' coolers, but the HD 7970 certainly does have it.