Question Fan out of control on second-hand GPU ?

[siaan312]

Hello and thanks in advance to all who help,

I recently bought a second-hand Palit RTX 3090 GamingPro GPU, and I have noticed that it's fan has a mind of it's own. It's decently quiet at idle, but when gaming it ramps up and down every few seconds.

For example, while playing Overwatch it would ramp up 100% for a few seconds at random intervals, then slow down to super quiet. Or while playing Yakuza 3 Remastered I've noticed it ramp up during cutscenes and fight scenes almost 100% of the time, and only infrequently during regular gameplay.

The noise itself is annoying but manageable, it's the sharp turns and falls in fan speed that make it impossible to not notice it.

I've installed MSI afterburner and tried tuning the fan curve, but it doesn't seem to help much (0 fan speed up to 48C, then a gradual rise up to 70% fan speed at 80 degrees.)

What can I try to solve this issue?

 

[Lutfij]

I recently bought a second-hand Palit RTX 3090 GamingPro GPU
You might want to disassemble the card and replace the thermal paste and pads with something higher in quality. This would also be a good excuse to give the entire card a deep cleaning.

Did you run DDU to remove all GPU drivers(intel, AMD and Nvidia) in Safe Mode, then manually installing the latest GPU driver sourced from Nvidia's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator(assuming you're on Windows OS)?

 

[siaan312]

I recently bought a second-hand Palit RTX 3090 GamingPro GPU
You might want to disassemble the card and replace the thermal paste and pads with something higher in quality. This would also be a good excuse to give the entire card a deep cleaning.

Did you run DDU to remove all GPU drivers(intel, AMD and Nvidia) in Safe Mode, then manually installing the latest GPU driver sourced from Nvidia's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator(assuming you're on Windows OS)?

I haven't DDUed the driver, but it was an upgrade from a gtx 1080 so I thought it wasn't necessary, I'll do as suggested.

I can disassemble the card but I'm unsure if that's really the issue, I don't think It's overheating, I just think the fancurve is problematic, I thought maybe I can put it on some sort of quiet mode or something? My question was mostly asking if there was such a feature

 

[siaan312]

I recently bought a second-hand Palit RTX 3090 GamingPro GPU
You might want to disassemble the card and replace the thermal paste and pads with something higher in quality. This would also be a good excuse to give the entire card a deep cleaning.

Did you run DDU to remove all GPU drivers(intel, AMD and Nvidia) in Safe Mode, then manually installing the latest GPU driver sourced from Nvidia's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator(assuming you're on Windows OS)?

DDUed and repasted GPU as you said above, happened to have some MX-4 on hand so I used it.

Now my problem is somewhat solved, I no longer get spikes in fan speed, but opening HWINFO I see that I actually don't get any variability in them, as well as a constant 38C GPU temp.

After around an hour of gaming the hotspot got to 100C, and so did the memory, but the main GPU temp stayed constant, I saw the same thing before I repasted so this is not new behaviour.
With the GPU temperature seemingly not changing, the fans don't kick in at all and stay at a quiet 1300rpm.

The backplate was so hot I could not touch it at all until the card cooled down.

Is the temperature sensor dead? Is there a way to try and revive it?

 

[siaan312]

I also did a furmark 2 stresstest, the memory and hotspot temps slowly rose (The hotspot didn't kick right up to 100C so I repasted correctly) but the fans did not kick in, and in the program it also read 38C gpu temp.

Edit:
After a reset, GPU temps is still stuck, but now at 42, hotspot and memory are working correctly.