I have a very expensive graphics card installed in my Windows 10 machine. It is an EVGA GeForce GTX980 Ti Classified.
I'm pretty happy with the experience so far, but the one problem I have is that the default fan speed profile toggles from 0rpm to something low like 400 rpm at the 60 degrees Celsius point. Since this control system works in a really simplistic way, what tends to happen is that in my comfortable ambient room temperature of around 21.5 Celsius, the fan control will actually oscillate at a rate of two minutes or so. Every few minutes, the fan makes a subtle but quite noticeable "clucking" sound as it ramps up in speed from 0 to 400 RPM. (Obviously these brushless computer fans do not have hall sensors in them in order to operate them smoothly at low speeds). This fan speed is capable of easily dropping the temperature under 50 degrees, and it promptly switches off, and some time after, depending on how much I open up the Windows Start menu (or what have you), the temp will eventually creep back to 60, and trigger an audible sound from my computer.
I must therefore use a program such as EVGA PrecisionX or something else to override the fan control, leaving it to run it at 400 RPM no matter how cold it gets, or not have it spin up at all until closer to 70 degrees, as we really do need a higher temp threshold for continuous passive operation in my room.
This is fine and I usually do this, but I can really tell that PrecisionX and similar apps (such as MSI Afterburner) are really rather bloated and terrible (not in the sense that they don't work, but in the sense that a lot of the UI implementation feels laggy and shoddy, generally don't behave consistently, and there are occasional problems persisting certain settings, and so on), and I'm a little bit anal about keeping my system clean from background processes... Today I saw that my mouse cursor was flashing the ring on it once per second and it syncs up with the fan RPM update display on PrecisionX. It's just a bad sign and I hate the idea of having to trade off more CPU cycles than really necessary just to run bloated software to make my fans behave better.
I see a few approaches for this:
- BIOS mod
- Find better software
Obviously option 2 is preferable but option 1 has the kind of permanency that transfers across operating systems. Maybe there's another software (plain old Rivatuner?) that I can use that will work just as well as PrecisionX that is less bloated or painful to configure.
There used to be something that goes into the nvidia control panel:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-system-tools-6.08-driver.html
But support only goes up to the 500 series according to the page. I tried it and the performance panel features for fan control are very minimal. I would be worried that if I set the speed to 20% here that it will force it at 20% all the time even when running a heavy load. And also this software also looks and behaves very sketchy as well. Rather stick to PrecisionX honestly.
