I have some fans on the side of my case which is the Cougar spike and when i take them off the gpu temps drop by about ten degrees Celsius. Is this normal?
Thanks
No! Not normal! Fans should be moving air away from anything hot and maybe even move cool air towards it. So you may want to notice your fan's placement as well as direction (sucking or blowing). You might even want to unclog your fans of any debris as well as check that they spin freely too.
I am using the corsair AF 120 fans and tried both blowing on the graphics card and pulling air away. the temps were the same but without the fans it is around 39 at idle rather than 50 with the fans.
There is something you're not telling us. I don't know what it is, but I can tell you that it's not normal to increase temperatures by blowing cool air on it. So like I said, it would seem to have something to do with direction of air flow and possibly the air itself.
It's only a guess but I'd say you're drawing already hot air from somewhere close by like a power supply or high power video card or something and then trying to cool your CPU with it. (A bit like trying to cool molten steel with a blow torch.) So direction of airflow through the case is definitely something to look at -- not just fan direction.
Generally, airflow should take cool air in from the front and move it through the case and over your hot components exhausting out the rear. If this air is heated before it gets to your CPU then yes, the temperature would go up as compared to running it open case. Correcting this can sometimes be tricky especially if you have a nice warm video card or some other component acting as a diverting "wall" too. And when cards, drives, cables, etc. act like more air diverts other things tend to get warm when they are denied their cooler air flow. Therefore, I can only suggest looking at your PC's innerds a bit more physically and ask yourself if the cooling air is really all that cool. Also try to figure out if it isn't being diverted away from where it needs to go. And if you have a window in the case you might even want to use some smoke to see where air is actually flowing too.
I can't say if that's going to help. But even for a older Core i3 CPU to be at 50C (122F) isn't all that bad. Not great but still acceptable. I'd start worrying if it's running at 70C (158F) at idle and getting any hotter. The boiling point of water is 100C (212F) and cheap solder doesn't begin to melt until 118C (244F) so hopefully that helps put things into perspective a little more too.
The case that I have is very poor when it comes to cooling and my graphics card is wedged in between two usb adapter cards. the card is a asus amd r7 260x oc which seems to have some weird issues like running really hot. Could the issue be that my pc is up on my desk and not somewhere cooler?
Fan placement in a computer is more important than the fans themselves. You need to look inside your case, and at the case itself, and see where you need air to flow within it and place fans accordingly.
okay thanks for the input I will try to tweak my setup to run cooler.