Question -30% fan speed/auto fan

[SOEBC]

I'm struggling to find a way to identify if a GPU has ability to have true manual fan settings. My 3060ti wouldn't allow me to set fans below 30% and my 6800xt doesn't allow me to set fans below 30%, during idle both fans auto spin up and then turn off again repeatedly making it quite possibly the worst modern feature on a graphics card.

The Afterburner settings don't seem to work for me and AMD doesn't have the option to go below 30% on their inputs, is there a piece of software that actually works with overruling this stupid 'feature'

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

I'd say they are hardware limits baked into the vbios. The reason most likely to ensure no malfunction if a user deceides to drop fan speed below a certain point. Most GPU's don't have a silent mode, where they just boot up fan speed from 0 to lets say 50% or whatever. They mostly always spin and 30% kinda makes sense as abaseline, no?

 

[SOEBC]

It doesn't make sense no, its annoying and neither wanted nor needed.

I want to set my fans to 10%, not have them constantly spin up to 30% then stop then respin up to 30% then stop then respin upto 30% its stupid

 

[BFG-9000]

Well there are Ampere vBIOS editors now, because the nVidia BIOS signature lock has been broken so now you can flash modded BIOSes.

But I think you will quickly find why they set 30% as the minimum. Fans have a minimum starting voltage, and below that they won't start or will just cog in pulses, making even more annoying sounds than the 30%. In other words the fan may be able to go from higher voltage down to 10% and keep spinning, but won't properly spin up from a dead stop with too little voltage. So while you probably could set it to start at 30% and drop to 10% each time, that would sound just as annoying.

Moral: you need more expensive fans too which can start at 10% for this to be useful

 

[Grobe]

Agreed with @BFG-9000 above.

I've actually attempted this myself many years ago in a lab environoment - where speed controller was just an analog circuit. Trying to make the speed both low and stable for a dirt cheap DC motor is hard and will probably result as described in the above post.

 

[SOEBC]

Right, so how did they used to do it then? every GPU I've owned up until the 30 series had fully adjustable fans no matter make or model

 

[Grobe]

Right, so how did they used to do it then?

Note: I haven't investigated on motherboards nor GPU specific fans, but in general there are some ways:

• Use a fan with a better / more expensive motor.
• Fan with BLDC motor, but no internal circuitry controller (haven't seen this on commercial motherboards/GPU as I expect this being both a expensive and unnecessary cumbersome solution)
• Probably best method is to use a fan with 4 wires - those fans are meant to be controlled directly by PMW output - in contrast to voltage.

Btw - one thing not mentioned about consumer based computer fans (3 wired). Most of them are actually a BLDC motor with a built-in controller board. The thing is that this that - in contrast to regular DC motors - the controller board cannot operate when the voltage goes lower than a certain threshold, thus makes it impossible to regulate on very low rpm's.

 

[SOEBC]

I'm unsure how this is a good thing, if all you do is turn your pc on and play games then fine, for any other use case its annoying and will just shorten the lifetime of the hardware which is likely why there was a push for easily replaceable fans on GPU's recently that I hadn't thought too much about.
Stop start is always worse in these conditions, so unless these companies are saving money with what you say about controllers then I just don't see any reason to do it.

 

[BFG-9000]

But that is exactly why they did it, so they could use cheap fans with start-stop. If you don't want to use that anyway, and your fans already go to 100% briefly on power-on or wake from sleep, then all you'd presumably have to do in an Ampere BIOS editor is change the minimum speed up from the 0% it is set at now in the fan curve.

You'd have to experiment to find the minimum reliable speed of the worst of your fan samples, but that shouldn't be dangerous like blindly overclocking in vBIOS to values beyond what you can set in overclock software--it may just take awhile to find something that isn't actually more annoying. Thing is, modding anything newer than Turing is presently very experimental + most reports for Ampere and Ada are only of crossflashing other vendors' unmodified BIOSes at the moment, so you may want to hold off until the software matures a bit. But at least you could open your vBIOS right now and see why the fan curve is so objectionable.