1660ti minimum fan speed

[Tony359]

Hello all,

I've just acquired an MSI Ventus 1660ti to replace my 1050ti in my Home Theatre PC. The card works well and after replacing the thermal paste I gained 10C. Undervolting gave me some extra coolness so I'm happy.

What I didn't realise is that being a VENTUS card, it doesn't have idle fan stop but, most importantly, the fan's minimum speed is locked by BIOS at 1500rpm which is a bit too much. Afterburner doesn't seem to be able to override that limit.

Is there anything I can do to change that? I am not interested in the Idle fan stop feature but I'd like to reduce the minimum speed of the fans. Someone elsewhere has suggested flashing a BIOS from an MSI 1660ti gaming model. Before improvising, I'd appreciate some pointers!

Worst case scenario, I am capable of removing the BIOS IC and I do have a programmer to flash it.

I understand nowadays any vBIOS can be flashed on any nvidia card. I thought there would be a way to simply modify the existing one but if not mistaken that is not an option yet.

Any help appreciated!

Cheers!
Tony

 

[Tetras]

There's someone on reddit who did flash their Ventus and it worked, zero-rpm was enabled, but the card was not stable.

It might be because other parts of the card are different, just the memory being a different manufacturer with other speeds/timings can give you an unstable card.

My preference would be to modify the BIOS you have, but I don't know if the community knows how/has the tools to modify them.

 

[Tony359]

Thanks - indeed, modding the existing BIOS would be the best but I cannot find evidence that this is even possible? Though I've read on (Reddit?) someone claiming to be using the "gaming" BIOS on their Ventus with no issues. As you say, it might be a coincidence and the vBIOS they used happened to be from a card with the same VRAM type.
I'd be happy to experiment with other vBIOS though. Do I need nflashk to bypass the model checking? And is there a "backup plan" - that is, I believe I can flash the original vBIOS if not working using the onboard graphic?

 

[Tony359]

Just to update, after educating myself I have flashed the "Gaming X" BIOS (it's an identical board basically, just with some extra features and a little extra boost). No issues whatsoever and I now have idle fan stop. The fan can go down to 25% (800rpm) manually if needed.

No instabilities and benchmarks are slightly higher because of the extra boost. I've undervolted the card and made a custom fan curve and it's perfect now.

I used the official nvflash and this BIOS. nvflash complained the PCI ID was different but let me flash anyways.

I had a couple of crashed in DOOM Ethernal but due to excessive undervolting, resolved by reducing the undervolting to 900mV.

Thanks!