Stupid Simple Cooling Hack for 4 x HD 5970 in one Computer
I am asked sometimes why I used a cheap $60 motherboard with PCIe x1 slots and four $30 flexible PCIe x1 extenders to build this 4 x AMD Radeon HD 5970 graphics card machine, when I could buy a motherboard with four x16 slots and not need any extender for the same price. As I said in that post, and as I showed in pictures, this makes cooling easy as the ~2cm gap between each card dramatically helps with cooling. Without this gap, full loads on the cards raise GPU temperatures to 95-100°C within minutes, at which point GPU clocks start being throttled, degrading performance.
But I found a simpler solution to take care of the cooling problem that does not involve extenders:
