ok where do you live?

do you have ebay access?

second I am wondering about the sound card too so if anyone can help out

a couple of things come to mind

first try moving the second card into a lower pci-e slot if you have it that would give the top card more room to breath

second try removing the second card and then see if the problem persists.
if the top card exceeds temps even when its alone send it for rma as their is a problem

however if the top card works fine on its own and the bottom card works fine on its own as well, it could be that the bottom card heats up the top card

I dont have extensive experience in sli so that's all I can tell you atm

No but it was the same design, those fans are not really designed to make a significant difference in getting hot air out of the system. You would need a bigger fan which can get rid of heat in a much better way.

At the end of the day fans make a much less impact than say a heatsink. They are designed to keep the flow of air continous rather than cool components.

Fans do matter but the bigger they are the better they'll get the job done. Tiny fans would not even make a difference unless you are in an equatorial region with temps in the high 40s where every bit would help

When you try the fan out make sure you benchmark system temps before and after to see if the power drain, pci bracket usage and noise is worthwhile as compared to tempreture drops. I doubt you'll see even 1 degree difference but try it out none the less

in one word

crap

I've used stuff like this before, its absolutely no good.

Get bigger fans like 120mm+ and fit em in your system if you can, they'll make more of a difference.

Get a aftermarket cooler/heatsink, that will make a ton of difference.

Stuff like that is just wasting your money on, even if it is $5

This is my personal opinion from my own experiences, aftermarket heatsinks and even thermal pastes are much better at heat dissapation than this stuff

Can you post your system config?

What type of motherboard do you have.

Ram may help with performance issues but your GPU also plays an important role in this process.

I read a long time ago that Win7 needed 4gigs to cache everything and keep everything ready to go.

RAM is cheap nowadays so you should upgrade to 8 gigs, if you get dual channel that will work with 1155 series intel as well in case you want to upgrade.

I can't answer your question as to how much of a performance gain you will see, you will definately see slight improvement and even better improvement if you have programs running in the background and you are playing a game as well.

HAF X with window and Asus Maximus IV Extreme inside, pretty cool with all the switches and leds on.

First time I got a case with a window, so I like it

The problem could lie in any of the major components:

Motherboard
CPU
GPU
Power Supply
RAM

If your computer refuses to start up and starts up again after a few hours or days, I'm betting on the motherboard dying out.

Your system is quite old now, if you game on a regular basis maybe you want to think about investing in a newer system.

If you don't want to or can't upgrade you can always take it down to a store and ask them to take a look at it, although if the problem cannot be replicated then you have a major problem since if no one can find what's wrong no one can fix it.

Edit: You can always stress test individual components to see what breaks first if anything.
Run PRIME to check your CPU
MEMTEST86 or SP2004 to check your RAM

Run CPUID to check if your voltages are optimal, and also search on google for stress test programs and run them one at a time.
If something hangs up on a particular test atleast you'll know what's wrong.

Hi, I had an idea which might be good to be included in all future PC games reviews.

When reviewing games if it included what programs were installed along with the game itself.

I don't mean binaries or runtimes, but toolbars or download clients like steam or origin.

Most games mention if they use steamworks and its understood that steam will be installed, but from my understanding of Origin, its purely a download client and not a store like steam which integrates games into itself for drm and library as well as updates purposes.

ATM I'm not keen on installing Origin just to play BF3 since that particular client will have no benefit of running after the game starts up.

So what do you think? A small addition to the side of the page letting us know if games require clients like Steam, Origin or toolbars to be forcefully installed along with the games itself.

Asus