Well my GTX1080 has been essentially underclocked due to the fan curve
Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:34 pm
I was working behind my gaming PC the other day because I seemed to have a bad monitor cable on my secondary monitor. While working on that I noticed (because I had a game running) that the exhaust coming out of the video card was so hot, I was concerned it would (or had) damaged the cable.
So I installed MSI Afterburner to see what my temps were and I was shocked. The card was running at 82 degrees C. That's MAX temp for that card. That card has an 82 degree cap, after which it throttles down the clock to keep the temp below 83 C. So I was essentially losing around 100MHz of clock speed (the GPU clock was throttling down to around 1730 MHz from the actual max boost clock of 1833).
So I scrolled down to the fan speed monitor in Afterburner and get another shock. Even at 82 C, the fan was only running at 54%!
A little more digging and I found that the fan curve was practically flat, It starts at 40% and tops out at 54%.
Now this is the single fan blower stock NVidia 1080 I got from vvjohn. I normally only buy EVGA 3 fan models. So my theory is, since this seems to be the default fan curve, is that this is how NVidia keeps the fan noise down. Sure enough, overriding the fan and setting it to 70% makes it considerably louder, and at 100% it wails.
A little experimentation allowed me to figure out that 78% fan speed was required to keep the temps at around 75 C. So I defined a custom fan curve that tops out at around 78% at 75C, and for safety jumps up to 100% at 81 C. Yes, a bit noisier, but I play with headphones on and I don't notice it.
For good measure I went into the mobo BIOS and bumped the fan curves up on the front and back case fans which are ultra silent 120mm Nexus fans. Even at 80% you can barely hear them. I made the curve much more aggressive to allow for better air flow.
I think this might explain why sometimes I would inexplicably get 10fps dips during gameplay. With the new GPS fan curve, my frame rate seems much smoother and more consistent. KF2 is now a rock steady 90 fps, where I used to get dips down into the low 80s.
So I installed MSI Afterburner to see what my temps were and I was shocked. The card was running at 82 degrees C. That's MAX temp for that card. That card has an 82 degree cap, after which it throttles down the clock to keep the temp below 83 C. So I was essentially losing around 100MHz of clock speed (the GPU clock was throttling down to around 1730 MHz from the actual max boost clock of 1833).
So I scrolled down to the fan speed monitor in Afterburner and get another shock. Even at 82 C, the fan was only running at 54%!
A little more digging and I found that the fan curve was practically flat, It starts at 40% and tops out at 54%.
Now this is the single fan blower stock NVidia 1080 I got from vvjohn. I normally only buy EVGA 3 fan models. So my theory is, since this seems to be the default fan curve, is that this is how NVidia keeps the fan noise down. Sure enough, overriding the fan and setting it to 70% makes it considerably louder, and at 100% it wails.
A little experimentation allowed me to figure out that 78% fan speed was required to keep the temps at around 75 C. So I defined a custom fan curve that tops out at around 78% at 75C, and for safety jumps up to 100% at 81 C. Yes, a bit noisier, but I play with headphones on and I don't notice it.
For good measure I went into the mobo BIOS and bumped the fan curves up on the front and back case fans which are ultra silent 120mm Nexus fans. Even at 80% you can barely hear them. I made the curve much more aggressive to allow for better air flow.
I think this might explain why sometimes I would inexplicably get 10fps dips during gameplay. With the new GPS fan curve, my frame rate seems much smoother and more consistent. KF2 is now a rock steady 90 fps, where I used to get dips down into the low 80s.