Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

So the fans get their power from the PCIe slots, not from those PCI-E power wires from the power supply?

Don't those driver updates sometimes include firmware updates for video cards, or no? I know sometimes wireless NICs do. I was thinking something like "improved fan curve", the drivers would have to update something on the actual video card...is that incorrect?

Thanks.

No it's always driver only.
It's too dangerous to update the cards BIOS with a driver update.
Think of how many RMA's that could generate if something goes wrong with the update!
I once had a 7900GT (if I remember right) where I had to update the BIOS to get decent fan control, the original had it running way too hot.

Actually found the old e-mail, here it is:

Question (4/5/2008 1:10:26 PM): Hi, I've got BIOS v62.92.16.00.06 and I just realized the card is not throttling the fan speed for me It's "stuck" at ca 30% and never goes up, not even with the core temp hitting 96°C according to ATI Tool! I've setup fan speed throttling manually now in Riva Tuner and this made the temps much better, plus the computer stopped crashing with a BSOD complaining about nvlddmkm.sys with bugcheck 0x116 while gaming! I'm running Vista Ultimate x64 SP1, currently with driver 174.74, before 169.25 aswell, both with the same issue... Do you have a BIOS where the temperature settings are more "sensibly" setup? I set it up in Rivatuner like this; Duty Cycle min:34 Duty Cycle max: 100 Tmin:60 T Range:32 T Operating:78 T low limit:55 T high limit:90 It was originally; Duty Cycle min:29 Duty Cycle max: 100 Tmin:79 T Range:32 T Operating:90 T low limit:80 T high limit:100
Answered By Peter T (4/11/2008 8:53:22 AM): There is a newer BIOS available on our site that should cover this problem.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

Not so much the OS as the driver (which is at least partially dependent on the OS). This has been common in video cards for years (with both AMD and Nvidia), and not just the fans, but other aspects of the cards as well, hence what the early Radeon RX series cards had issues drawing too much power from the PCIe slot and in come cases burning the slot until AMD released a driver update, and if you read the release notes of GPU drivers "improved fan curve" is often in there.

So the fans get their power from the PCIe slots, not from those PCI-E power wires from the power supply?

Don't those driver updates sometimes include firmware updates for video cards, or no? I know sometimes wireless NICs do. I was thinking something like "improved fan curve", the drivers would have to update something on the actual video card...is that incorrect?

Thanks.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

I don't think he's trying to have the OS control the fans. I think his goal was to be able to read the speed fans from the OS. I think he installed these programs when the PC started locking up when he was playing games. He had a closed loop liquid cooling system for his CPU. The pump seized. He installed temperature monitoring programs to try and see what was happening, but they're not properly reading the sensor data for one reason or another.

I thought this was the problem. I thought the programs like SpeedFan were incorrectly reading the sensor data and, thinking the temps were much lower than they were, were limiting the speed of the fan. But they seem to read the GPU just fine, it's just the CPU they seem to think is around 3C (with a good pump) or so. With the bad pump, they were higher. Because the temps are off so bad with SpeedFan, we thought it was within the specs. But that's because we were assuming SpeedFan was reporting the temps correctly. It wasn't until we started using the BIOS to monitor the CPU temps that I started to suspect the pump was bad.

I took my PSU and tried powering the pump directly. There was voltage going to the pump, but no current. A new pump fixed this and then SpeedFan started reporting the CPU temps at around 3C, which was much lower than what it was reading before. The PSU (programmable) worked to power the new pump, this is how I was able to tell the pump was expecting something like a pulse.

The BIOS reports the CPU temperature correctly. The BIOS doesn't report the GPU temps, for obvious reasons. Him and his girl are up in Ithaca at something that he's calling a loke a day-trip date, whatever that is. Loke might be a typo, I dunno. He's supposed to be coming back sometime today.

[dmill89]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

what asshole allows the o.s. to control the fans?

Not so much the OS as the driver (which is at least partially dependent on the OS). This has been common in video cards for years (with both AMD and Nvidia), and not just the fans, but other aspects of the cards as well, hence what the early Radeon RX series cards had issues drawing too much power from the PCIe slot and in come cases burning the slot until AMD released a driver update, and if you read the release notes of GPU drivers "improved fan curve" is often in there.

[stj]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

no, the proper fix would be a microcontroller and the internal diode/thermocouple in a closed loop seperate from the pc system.

[momaka]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

I'll put a fresh copy of 10 on another hard drive when I get his PC back (he currently has it and it's hard getting in touch with him right now). Even in trial mode, it should at least allow us to rule out or confirm hardware issue vs software issue.

Exactly!

Trial modes are more than fine for testing hardware.

what asshole allows the o.s. to control the fans?

*Raises hand quietly*

Having the OS control the fans is not that much worse than having the card's BIOS control them. Some manufacturers already turn the fans down in BIOS so much (to keep it quiet) that the card cooks itself in a few years.

My old Radeon HD3870 cards are all like that. I always force the fans to run to at least 45%, which allows them to stay around 40-45°C in idle. When gaming, I turn up the speed to around 60%, which in many cases keeps the core temps under 60°C.

Sure the proper fix would be to mod the BIOS and flash it... and I've been meaning to do that for a long time now. But I also like to have extensive tests done so that I know what speeds to set in the BIOS.

[stj]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

fuck this,
what asshole allows the o.s. to control the fans?
that's just asking for the gpu to be killed by a virus, a rogue buggy o.s. (windows),
or just some asshole who wants his supercomputer to "run silent" and has some type of "power tweak" program off the net he does not understand!

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

In that case, there may be a driver issue causing the card not to enter into power saving mode. Hard to tell without a GPU-Z screenshot, though. Use that to see if the clocks and voltages throttle.

Reinstalling the drivers may or may not fix the issue. I've seen botched drivers make it impossible to do anything other than to reinstall the OS to get rid of them

That said, before you reinstall his OS... try a new OS on a spare HDD, if you have one. At work, I always used to pull HDDs from recycled computers and save them for this purpose. Many times, I found hardware problems that were caused by the OS and not the hardware itself.

With that said, you can try Windows 10 on your test drive, as it seems to care the least when you switch it between totally different hardware. Either that, or if the computer is older, Windows XP Pro with VLK key, if you have one. VLK allows you to change the hardware as much as you like without setting flags and deactivating the OS.

I like the hard drive idea and if botched drivers can cause this, then I think that's the issue. He said he put the official AMD drivers on but they were incompatible. He probably never uninstalled them. He said he had to grab drivers from the manufacturer's website (it's some weird name that I want to say has something to do with rainbows or something). He said those drivers haven't been updated in years.

I thought of this a little and figured by him installing the nVidia card, it'd rule out the AMD driver issue all together. But could having those AMD drivers installed be affecting the nVidia card as well I wonder? I'd think not, but maybe they are somehow. It's Windows 10. I want to say it's Ultimate, which to me, means almost always a pirated copy. Who knows what the disc might have contained!!!!

I'll put a fresh copy of 10 on another hard drive when I get his PC back (he currently has it and it's hard getting in touch with him right now). Even in trial mode, it should at least allow us to rule out or confirm hardware issue vs software issue.

[momaka]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

They're not working, the programs to adjust the fan speeds. That's the problem. The temperature of the GPU keeps rising and rising, and the fans are barely spinning.

I think if the video card works in another computer, we should look at his PSU and see if that fixes the issue, and if not, maybe reinstall Windows, the proper way.

In that case, there may be a driver issue causing the card not to enter into power saving mode or not turn the fans... or a piece of software that has rooted itself in the driver-level. Hard to tell without a GPU-Z screenshot, though. Use that to see if the clocks and voltages throttle.

Reinstalling the drivers may or may not fix the issue. I've seen botched drivers make it impossible to do anything other than to reinstall the OS to get rid of them

That said, before you reinstall his OS... try a new OS on a spare HDD, if you have one. At work, I always used to pull HDDs from recycled computers and save them for this purpose. Many times, I found hardware problems that were caused by the OS and not the hardware itself.

With that said, you can try Windows 10 on your test drive, as it seems to care the least when you switch it between totally different hardware. Either that, or if the computer is older, Windows XP Pro with VLK key, if you have one. VLK allows you to change the hardware as much as you like without setting flags and deactivating the OS.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

Undervolting can make things run much cooler than you think.

Just to give you a ballpark: a 20% drop in the core voltage will also drop the load temperatures by about 20%... and sometimes even more. So a card running at 80°C under load may drop down to 64°C (given the same fan airflow as at 80°C - I'm just mentioning this, because some GPUs tend to turn the fans up only when the GPU starts baking at 80+°C).

To undervolt, however, the GPU core also needs to be underclocked accordingly.

If I'm not mistaken, this video card here is overclocked at the factory. I think they just crank up the core voltage to get it run faster, and hotter. The two fans on his card seem extremely cheap.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

The R9 380 basically qualifies as a space heater with a 190W TDP (that's 10W more than a GTX 1080 which has a 180W TDP) and non-reference examples with a mild factory overclock like that MSI have been known to draw over 200W under load, so while that may be worth a shot I don't think there is much of anything that will make it run exceptionally cool.

I know these R9 380's run hot. Something's really wrong here though.

What normally controls the fan speed? I'd imagine the firmware on the video card itself, right? At first at least, and then maybe the driver or some program can modify the speed? The BIOS in the PC can control fan speeds to some degree, right? But can it control video card fan speeds?

I'm trying to figure out why both video cards in his PC has the same issue. Fan's are not being controlled. When they do spin, it's extremely slow. The video card I loaned him, in another computer, works just fine. Something definitely with the PC.

His video card is an AMD, the one I loaned him is an nVidia. Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? For some reason, I'm leaning towards power supply. the nVidia uses an 8-pin and 6-pin, his AMD card uses two 6-pins.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

What temperatures are you seeing ?

It's been a bit since I worked on this (I've been real busy doing other stuff and just haven't had the time) but I want to say it was locking around 80C or so. Maybe higher. He ran out of minutes on his phone so we're having trouble communicating now.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

For older hardware and OSes, RivaTuner is great.

Not sure what you would use for the newer stuff like an R9 380, though. Perhaps MSI Afterburner as dmill89 said.

You don't need to bump the speed up to 100%. Just enough so the card is kept cool.

Use GPU-Z to monitor the temperature. If it goes over 45°C, speed up the fans a bit. Ideally, you want to keep the idle temps below 50°C (below 45°C would be even better) and the load temperatures to no more than 60°C if possible. That should give you a fairly long-lasting card (though there is a lot more on that topic, but I will forgo going into that now).

They're not working, the programs to adjust the fan speeds. That's the problem. The temperature of the GPU keeps rising and rising, and the fans are barely spinning.

I think if the video card works in another computer, we should look at his PSU and see if that fixes the issue, and if not, maybe reinstall Windows, the proper way.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

What OS are you using it with?

If you're on Windows the MSI gaming app available on MSIs site should give you the ability to set up custom fan curves or set the fans to 100% all the time(they will be loud as hell if you do). Just about every video card vendor has such an app these days (at least for non-reference cards with custom coolers, etc.): https://us.msi.com/Graphics-card/sup...l#down-utility

If the PWM controller is completely shot and software doesn't work you can always hard wire than fans to 12V but again they will be very noisy.

It is Windows and that app is supposed to allow us to set the fans, but there's something wrong. Originally, we thought it was the video card, it's not, it's something with the PC. Another video card is experiencing the same problems. Fans don't run very fast at all (extremely slow) and the PC hard locks after x amount of minutes. Not really sure how to proceed with this.

I'm going to just verify that the card itself works in another PC and runs accordingly. This person knows a bit about computers, so who knows what he did. I didn't install the OS, he did. Maybe he used a pirated copy? I dunno. He has a few programs installed to read speed fans. To make sure there wasn't a conflict, I had him run msconfig and disable all non-microsoft services and all auto-start programs. Still same issue.

I'll check the power supply as well. Maybe those two 6-pin cables going to the PSU aren't working properly? I would have thought the fans would have drawn their power from the PCI-E bus though. Maybe not.

[momaka]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

More like liquid cooling territory.

Think about the GPU as if it was a CPU. If you had a ~200W CPU, you'd need a tall tower heatsink with at least 8 copper heatpipes and a 120 mm fan wooshing away. And even then, it would not run very cool under load (probably hitting high 50s Centigrade, minimum).

The thing about heatsinks is that the closer you want to keep the CPU/GPU temperature to room temperature, the size of the heatsink and airflow through it grow exponentially. The opposite of that is why manufacturers can get away with using a small heatsink on a CPU/GPU with a fairly large TDP: the higher the temperature of the heatsink goes above room/ambient, the easier it becomes to remove heat from it, even with minimal airflow.

[stj]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

190w??
that's ducting and 120mm fan territory!!

[momaka]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

Undervolting can make things run much cooler than you think.

Just to give you a ballpark: a 20% drop in the core voltage will also drop the load temperatures by about 20%... and sometimes even more. So a card running at 80°C under load may drop down to 64°C (given the same fan airflow as at 80°C - I'm just mentioning this, because some GPUs tend to turn the fans up only when the GPU starts baking at 80+°C).

To undervolt, however, the GPU core also needs to be underclocked accordingly.

[dmill89]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

That's a logical fallacy.

If you run the fan at full speed, nothing says the fan can't fail suddenly while you are not near the PC and take the GPU with it.

The only difference between running the fan full speed and at lower speed is that at the lower speed, it will take much longer to fail. But in both cases, you can end up with a fried GPU if you don't catch it.

Another thing I recommend to get a cooler GPU is to disable the boost clocks and boost voltages, if possible. Some GPUs might even need an underclock and undervolt mod to get them to last.

I see modern high-end GPUs push 1.2V on a sub-20 nanometer cores just to get higher clocks. That in itself is a HUGE problem and shows that manufacturers no longer care about how long hardware lasts.

The R9 380 basically qualifies as a space heater with a 190W TDP (that's 10W more than a GTX 1080 which has a 180W TDP) and non-reference examples with a mild factory overclock like that MSI have been known to draw over 200W under load, so while that may be worth a shot I don't think there is much of anything that will make it run exceptionally cool.

[momaka]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

if the fan is shit, better to find out now - and replace it.

if you run it slow, you wont notice it die till it takes the gpu with it.

That's a logical fallacy.

If you run the fan at full speed, nothing says the fan can't fail suddenly while you are not near the PC and take the GPU with it.

The only difference between running the fan full speed and at lower speed is that at the lower speed, it will take much longer to fail. But in both cases, you can end up with a fried GPU if you don't catch it.

Another thing I recommend to get a cooler GPU is to disable the boost clocks and boost voltages, if possible. Some GPUs might even need an underclock and undervolt mod to get them to last.

I see modern high-end GPUs push 1.2V on a sub-20 nanometer cores just to get higher clocks. That in itself is a HUGE problem and shows that manufacturers no longer care about how long hardware lasts.

Funny side note...
The electronics retailer where I was just working would offer extended warranties on pretty much everything we sold there.... except for high-end GPU.
Why? -Because the managers well know the return/failure rate on high-end GPUs. In particular, it first started with the GeForce GTX 1080 an 1080 TI, because people would buy them for "Deep Learning" and Bit Coin "mining" rigs. As such, the GPU is used at 100% load in these, and it quickly goes bad. So the 1080 and 1080 TI were the first cards on which we stopped offering extended warranty.

[stj]

Re: Forcing a video card fan to always run at full speed.

if the fan is shit, better to find out now - and replace it.

if you run it slow, you wont notice it die till it takes the gpu with it.