I tried that with one of my cards, except I bought an adapter to use the onboard fan control/power so i could regulate it from the control panel, even though I leave them at 100% almost all of the time anyways. I have concerns about running the cards at those temperatures, as they just don’t seem to run that stable for me, and keep rebooting. They love operating in the 45-50*c range, and can go an entire week without rebooting, if there aren’t any other reasons for a restart.
I will give the custom BIOS a try on the card I’m customizing right now. I’ve removed the cover and the huge passive heat sink, and I’m basically turning it into a “R9 Deluxe” by using individual heat sinks for the memory and CMOS transistors, and an “Active” fan powered heat sink for the GPU.
It’s going to be the ‘rat rod’ of server cards. Hopefully, this will make them a viable alternative to the crazy prices and non-availability of new cards.
Thanks for the tips.