Question Can fluctuations in the gpu fan rpms damage it?

[yung_dinero]

So I bought a second hand Gigabyte GTX 960 and it does something weird with the fans. When I'm idling it shoots all the way up to high rpms such as 2600, sometimes it reads over 80k !!! on msi afterburner, which is impossible for a fan.

I've done a fair bit of research and found out that you can remedy that by messing with the fan profile and setting it to run at a minimum of 45%, this way it runs stable all the way through.

However the problem is that when my PC is booting the fan is just free to do it's own thing without msi afterburner control. So in the 5 minutes it takes to get everything started (HDD life) the fan will spike up at least 10 times.

The question is rather simple, how bad are those random spike ups to the life of the fans? I've heard that what kills fans is constantly changing it's speed, but I'm not sure if that's just a myth or not so this has me a bit worried.

 

[Grobe]

You're probably correct about constant variations of fan speed will cause it to have a shorter life span. However I don't know if there exist any statistical material that can shed light about the acual expected reduction in lifetime compared to a fan that runs steady.