 Have you ever wondered about the placement of expansion cards in your rig, and how they might affect your graphics card temperatures and vice versa? Well today we're going to explore that from a few different angles. How much does it matter, in what scenarios does it matter, and how much do you need to worry about this kind of problem. Hit the like button if you like the idea of three or more hosts on Scrapyard Wars, and if you'd want to see that again. Intel brings DDR4 to the mainstream with their new Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K processors. Check the link in the video description to learn more. So for this video we can't actually use our standard test bench, because an open air rig would really screw with the test results compared to a close-off standard case, which is the majority of what users will have these days. So we need to go with a fairly standard scenario computer case in order to properly explore the temperature changes in these various scenarios. From here I chose two different graphics cards for testing. A reference 980Ti and an open air internal exhaust cooled styled G1 Gaming 980 from Gigabyte. To control the temperatures in the rest of the case we used a 240mm AIO cooler to pull the heat away from the CPU in what is a pretty common use case these days. And we used a control graphics card to interfere with the airflow of the two other test cards. I use the Titan X as our control card as it isn't too long and as it isn't too short, but being a blower style card it shouldn't be dumping a huge amount of heat into the rest of our bench and messing with the card in more substantial ways than just blocking off some of the airflow. I did our standard Crysis 3 Skybox test for about 10 minutes recording temperatures and clock speeds as I went through using the current test card's numbers. One thing to note is that this is not a direct comparison of whether a blower or internal exhaust style card is better at cooling itself. But if you want to see this Linus already has a video on it so just check it out up here in the top right hand corner. There were many opportunities for feature creep in this video. The amount of potential scenarios was a little insane so we had to tone it down to what we saw as the most common possible scenarios. Of which we decided on a full size average length test graphics card and a full size average length control card which we placed either directly against the test card as close as possible or as far away as possible on a 7 expansion slot case which is the bottom two slots. So basically the question is how much of an advantage are you gaining by pulling your second expansion card as far away as possible from the first. I think it's pretty common knowledge that largely blocking the airflow to one of your expansion cards if you have another option isn't exactly ideal but how much of an impact is it really? Well as these are ultimately different cards and comparing them together isn't really the point let's look at them individually. First up we have the blower style card. This is our GTX 980 Ti. This card already being on the edge of its cooling capabilities with an ambient room temperature of only actually 24 degrees didn't actually change what temperature it ran depending on where the expansion card was placed which sounds great at first but what it did do is pretty substantially change its effective clock speed due to how GPU boost works. Check out the video in the top right hand corner here if you want to know what the heck GPU boost does. The difference here between no control card installed and the control card in the worst possible position right next to our test card is a whopping 114 MHz which would actually be quite a noticeable difference in terms of performance but that's not where the story ends. As the difference between the control card being right below the test card and the control card being as far away as possible is still 88 MHz which is still a very noticeable performance improvement just for optimizing your expansion card layout. But what about the internal exhaust card? Well the G1 Gaming 980 actually did manage to get away from the good old classic Nvidia standard of 83 degrees while by itself in the case meaning that when we added the control card in the furthest away position the clock speed didn't go down like it did with the blower card but the temperature did go up slightly but it still did go up. That being said when we put the control card right up against it the temperature shot up to the previously mentioned 83 degrees and the clock speed shot down by a huge 139 MHz. Whoa! I had already assumed this card would be impacted more heavily but that's huge. So in conclusion this whole thing probably wasn't as surprising as it was interesting to me at least. Sure bad expansion card placement might not always even be up to you. You might have to do certain things and sure like I just said some scenarios you can't help it and most people won't even run into this problem because they'll probably only have one card. But there are some scenarios even if you do only have one card. The ever more popular as time goes on small ITX style systems where you may have to put your card directly against a side panel for instance could benefit from this knowledge and you may want to stay wary of that when choosing a case. TunnelBear the easy to use privacy app for mobile and desktop internet browsing. You can use TunnelBear on iOS, Android, Mac, PC and they even have a Chrome extension that lets you tunnel or browse the internet as if you're in one of up to 14 different countries with ease. One of my favorite uses of TunnelBear is the ability to access websites that are geo blocked within your country. 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Hopefully someone will kind of step up soon so I can look more into how it affects internal exhaust cards that aren't always pinned against their temperature limits like some blower cards that I tested earlier.