GPU (edit: PSU) fans suddenly ramp up for 1 second randomly

markator · 7 Mar 2018 at 22:00

Hi Guys,

Wonder if anyone had any ideas about an unusual fan issue I've having. Randomly and for no apparent reason my GPU fan(s) seem to kick in for literally a second and then go silent again. When they kick in it sounds like they are running at full speed (edit: or starting to ramp up to full speed but they never have enough time to reach max speed). This can happen in Windows but does appear to happen more frequently during games or benchmarking. I don't get any issues in games/benchmarking and the fan never becomes too noisy (apart from the random ramp up for 1 second or so). I would say this ramp up happens once every 30 mins to 2 hours. It's incredibly random.

I have a 1950X Threadripper build with Asus Rog Strix 1080Ti OC Edition GPUs in SLI mode. Mobo is a Gigabyte Designaire X399. I don't have any fan control in place of the GPUs.

Has anyone had similar issues at all?

Thanks

markator · 8 Mar 2018 at 00:34

I just realised this isn't the GPUs.... I can only attribute it to the PSU (Seasonic). A Titanium Prime 1000W - anyone with the same issues?

markator · 8 Mar 2018 at 01:19

Ok. I have answered my own question here. The 'silent' button on the PSU was on - i.e. no fan at low power draw. The ramp up sound was from the PSU when in this state. I have switched off 'silent mode' and now the PSU fan runs constantly preventing the ramp up...

Rroff · 8 Mar 2018 at 01:26

Yeah Seasonic PSUs use a variety of managed systems for the fan - mine for instance runs upto 250 watt load passive then kicks in the fan progressively beyond that. With TR CPU and SLI GPUs it is probably at some points now and again you get a spike of power draw which results in the PSU reacting. If you are running Windows 10 I'm gonna blame that as compared to other OSes it has a lot going on in the background and tends to do its own thing - you will sometimes get random tasks kicking in which can momentarily spike power draw.