Unexplained fan speed increase when idle? Strix GTX 780 6GB

[dizzy98]

I have two Asus Strix GTX 780 6GBs set up in SLI. For the past week or so, the main card (connected to the display) will randomly and intermittently increase its fan speed (often by a lot), for no apparent reason.

I have found:
1) MSI Afterburner and CPUID HWMonitor both show the fans at 0% when this happens. I had to verify by sight that it was the GPU fans.
2) Temps are always idle-level when this happens, i.e. 27-35 degrees.
3) If I engage the GPU (by firing up a game or a Redshift render), the behavior reverts to normal - the fans appear to follow the profile I set in Afterburner, and then (temporarily) go back to 0% once the cards cool down.
4) I haven't identified any unusual processes running when this happens. The only thing that's consistently active is svchost.exe. I suppose that could be infected, but MBAM and Trend Micro Housecall turned up nothing.
5) I'm using the latest drivers (375.70) on Win 7 64-bit. No Geforce Experience.

Has anyone seen this behavior before? Does anyone know what it might be?

 

[GameFreak01048]

What you could try to do is what I do with my 1060, although it can run at 0 RPM, that makes me uncomfortable...so i set a custom profile so that even at idle temps the fans are spinning at about 700 RPM, probably a bit overkill but that's how my old 960 acted and I want my PC to be super cool at all times, when I start a game my fan speed percentage matches the temps, so at 40 degrees the fans are spinning at 40%, probably overkill but meh.

What I would do is set your fan profile to run at about 500 RPM (probably around 20-22% speed) and see if the problem still persists.

 

[dizzy98]

Thanks for the response. So, I just tried setting my fan profile to 20% RPM at idle. Now, it seems to constantly alternate between 0% and some high RPM all the time! Afterburner shows it at a constant 20%, but based on the noise I can tell that's definitely not happening.

Could this be a problem with Afterburner? I really hope it isn't a hardware issue. Is this something that can happen to cards in general?

 

[GameFreak01048]

Thanks for the response. So, I just tried setting my fan profile to 20% RPM at idle. Now, it seems to constantly alternate between 0% and some high RPM all the time! Afterburner shows it at a constant 20%, but based on the noise I can tell that's definitely not happening.

Could this be a problem with Afterburner? I really hope it isn't a hardware issue. Is this something that can happen to cards in general?

As this thread suggests: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2366948/gpu-fan-randomly-spins-fast.html

Maybe it's worth taking the GPU out, cleaning the port and the card connectors completely and then firmly putting the GPU back in again and then see what result we get.

 

[dizzy98]

Thanks - I gave that a try, but no dice.

But I did discover that, when it happens, it's only ONE of the two fans on the card that's spinning. What is going on? Is there any way to fix this besides an RMA?

 

[GameFreak01048]

You could try to replace the fan but that might prove to be a challenge itself, I would RMA, that would be your best bet

 

[dizzy98]

Update in case anyone was interested: I ended up RMAing the card. Apparently they were unable to fix it, so they are sending me a Strix GTX 980ti 6GB. Guess I'm happy with the free upgrade, even though it means I can't SLI anymore.