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Nvidia minimum fan speed - why does this keep happening?

Never happens to me, maybe look at your afterburner settings and case cooling. Undervolt if you haven't already done so.
Also my fans (Astral 5090) run at a minimum 500 rpm when they aren't on 0 rpm fan stop. When they do turn on I can't hear them anyway.
 
Never happens to me, maybe look at your afterburner settings and case cooling. Undervolt if you haven't already done so.
Also my fans (Astral 5090) run at a minimum 500 rpm when they aren't on 0 rpm fan stop. When they do turn on I can't hear them anyway.
You didn't read the thread.
 
...it's not possible to set the fanspeed at 500rpm, that's the point of the thread?

The minimum fan speed is set by the AIB, mostly at arbitrarily high values (1,200 to 1,400 rpm). It's very annoying and they should stop doing that.
Ah I misunderstood.

@appletree - what the fan setup/airflow of the case? Hopefully if you can get enough air moving around it with low speed fans it can keep it cool enough.

...that or watercool it :P

Definitely rubbish design though and I wouldn't be at all surprised if nV restrict the AIBs ability to alter the BIOS
 
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I am operating the card in an open case, so basically no airflow, however also no heat accumulation inside the case. But even if it was in a closed case with zero airflow there is no reason the card should behave like it does.

Also as planned I have placed Noctua 120mm fan over the backplate venting area (a square cut out from the backplate with exposed heatsink) and running that fan on inaudible levels has completely eliminated the problem of GPU fans ramping up during "idle". However there is still problem of running old or esports games with light GPU load (i.e. around 100W) which will still trigger GPU fans spinning at 1400 rpm despite the GPU chilling at around 40C. Once the fans start spinning there is no chance of them stopping until card reaches around 33C, so no luck in light load scenario.
It's quite annoying during map loading moments, or waiting for matches where there is no in game sounds.

Unsurprisingly I have found that just by adding this one 120mm fan at the backplate (without necessity to mod the card) this dramatically improves the overall temperatures and / or noise vs. temperature balance. Now the card is able to run Cyberpunk with path-tracing while chilling at around 60C - 65C and while having the GPU fans at 1400rpm as well (while the Noctua fan still being close to inaudible). The built in GPU fans now actually have headroom for lower rpm even at full load. Therefore yet again I would much prefer for the card's fans running at lower rpm and having temps at around 75C instead thus yet again this stupid 30% fan speed limit is holding back the noise performance of the card even at full load. It's just so stupid. There are definitely games which have quiet passages in them where again this 1400rpm BS is breaking the immersion.
 
Isn't this just normal fan limitations.

DC fans can't go too low because they stall.
PWM fans can't go too low because the power switching starts being audible.

If the % that a mode can drop to is still too fast/noisy then the maximum speed of the fan has to be lower which may create a different problem of not being able to cool enough in hot conditions.
And magically all fans from all vendors can't go below 30% The hell they can't. Would be such an extreme coincidence if all of the various fans on the market were manufactured to the same physical limit of 30% Not to mention there is plenty of examples of fans that can go lower - like for example basically all the CPU fans. And even my specific experience of old GTX 580 when I replaced the stock cooler with Arctic accelero aftermarket tripple fan cooler, there the fans originally couldn't go below 30% But after I flashed the modifies BIOS to the card (which was still possible in the old days) they suddenly could go much lower. Like 600rpm or so if I remember correctly. And "incredibly" the card didn't break and actually worked flawlessly and quietly for a long time. This 30% is total BS which has 0 basis even if you are trying to take into consideration criteria like card longevity, physical limits of the fans or optimal noise vs. cooling performance.
 
It's frustating how stupid this 'problem' is, I think it's 100% on the AIBs.

They might not be in control of NVIDIA drivers or firmware or whatever else is forcing this '30%' minimum fan speed, but they are in control of how much power goes into the bloody fan itself. Pure laziness on behalf of the AIBs, they just don't care/couldn't be arsed.
Except there are Nvidia Founders Edition cards that suffer with the same problem i.e. of loud 1200 minimum rpm and have people complaining about it.
Also I believe this 30% minimum rpm is total overkill, completely wrong and unjustified from any point of angle.

While I agree that what various AIBs do with this 30% limitation is very far off from what should be possible with optimal designs, from AIBs perspective it of course makes sense to use components which are as cheap as possible and the money saved is understandably more important for them than the unreasonable minimum rpms of their designs. Especially when there is not a critical mass of people complaining about it. Yet if the Nvidia had lifted this stupid limit I am pretty sure that AIBs could come up with much quieter cooling solution at the lower ends of GPU utilization while using the same cheap low quality fans.
 
And magically all fans from all vendors can't go below 30% The hell they can't. Would be such an extreme coincidence if all of the various fans on the market were manufactured to the same physical limit of 30% Not to mention there is plenty of examples of fans that can go lower - like for example basically all the CPU fans. And even my specific experience of old GTX 580 when I replaced the stock cooler with Arctic accelero aftermarket tripple fan cooler, there the fans originally couldn't go below 30% But after I flashed the modifies BIOS to the card (which was still possible in the old days) they suddenly could go much lower. Like 600rpm or so if I remember correctly. And "incredibly" the card didn't break and actually worked flawlessly and quietly for a long time. This 30% is total BS which has 0 basis even if you are trying to take into consideration criteria like card longevity, physical limits of the fans or optimal noise vs. cooling performance.

I never said can't and I never said 30% and I never said break.

But seeing you type 30% four times in reply to me saying it never, maybe the PWM fan spec will un-coincidence matters: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/intel-nuc/intel-4wire-pwm-fans-specs.pdf
 
I never said can't and I never said 30% and I never said break.

But seeing you type 30% four times in reply to me saying it never, maybe the PWM fan spec will un-coincidence matters: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/intel-nuc/intel-4wire-pwm-fans-specs.pdf
Well "Isn't this just normal fan limitations." in the context of this thread heavily implied to me, that you meant the 30% limit is justified by physical limits of the fans. Which it isn't and I considered it important to point out. Then along the way I got carried away to include other hypothetical reasons why one could assume 30% limit to be justified and provided counter arguments to them as well. They were clearly not addressed to you but to Nvidia.

Thank you for providing the PWM specs. The relevant part should be that any PWM spec compliant fan at standstill must be able to start spinning when 30% PWM signal is applied. This is useful and I was not aware of this. It should finally explain where did the 30% number come from.
Since CPU fans don't suffer by the 30% limit there are clearly workarounds for it which are not being utilized by Nvidia GPUs:

1.) Quality fans can typically start consistently lower than 30% So when Nvidia is enforcing 30% limit this discourages any vendor from investing into more premium fans and tuning the starting percentage according to the exact specs of the fan. Higher quality GPUs could most likely go safely below 30% and still start from standstill.

2.) Once the fan is spinning, much lower PWM signal is needed to maintain the rotation, I think it's a safe bet that most of the GPU fans including the cheap ones would be able to sustain rotation at 20% PWM signal and some would be able to go even lower. But this is again not possible because Nvidia has chosen simplicity of their fan controller logic over user comfort (flat 30% means it's guaranteed the fan will spin, thus "problem solved", despite it leading to cases when the fan is at 1400 rpm as its minimum, which is quite insane.)

I just checked CPU coolers for highest difference between min and max rpm and I found one that is rated to go from 300 to 3300 rpm. So clearly there is a lot of headroom to go lower than 30%.
 
What RPM do the other fans in your system idle at, out of interest?
Since I am running open case I only have CPU cooler (two NF-A12 fans) at 22% or about 500rpm and then PSU which is 0 rpm at idle. So at idle my system is practically inaudible. And when I was still running the modded RTX 3080 (also with two NF-A12 fans), the system was usually almost quiet even during typical gaming scenarios (much quieter than the minimum rpm at this Inno3D 5080)
 
I just checked CPU coolers for highest difference between min and max rpm and I found one that is rated to go from 300 to 3300 rpm. So clearly there is a lot of headroom to go lower than 30%.

Do cpu fans start from off at 10%? That's what a gpu with fan stop would have to do over and over.

I don't have a huge range but from memory and my current pc the fans spin up high at boot then settles into whatever I've set it at, then never turns off.

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Choices choices. Perhaps if they chose to prioritise noise profiles the fan should ramp up once, settle low and then never turn off.
 
I've got the same issue with my 5090 zotac solid. It'll just randomly turn the fan on while browsing or watching a video and then eventually turn off again when it's cooled low enough. I think I'd have rathered it just be on a low RPM all the time instead of this weird situation of it being off then suddenly jumping to somewhat noisy. My case isn't the most open since its a FD R6 but I always leave the front "door" open to increase airflow. I do have my other fans on a quietish fan curve which makes it all the more obvious.
 
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I've got the same issue with my 5090 zotac solid. It'll just randomly turn the fan on while browsing or watching a video and then eventually turn off again when it's cooled low enough. I think I'd have rathered it just be on a low RPM all the time instead of this weird situation of it being off then suddenly jumping to somewhat noisy. My case isn't the most open since its a FD R6 but I always leave the front "door" open to increase airflow. I do have my other fans on a quietish fan curve which makes it all the more obvious.

What RPM is it running at the minimum? You can use HWMonitor to check.
 
I've got the same issue with my 5090 zotac solid. It'll just randomly turn the fan on while browsing or watching a video and then eventually turn off again when it's cooled low enough. I think I'd have rathered it just be on a low RPM all the time instead of this weird situation of it being off then suddenly jumping to somewhat noisy. My case isn't the most open since its a FD R6 but I always leave the front "door" open to increase airflow. I do have my other fans on a quietish fan curve which makes it all the more obvious.
Next time you watch videos/browse internet and the fans randomly turns on, could you check how much power its using and temp?

I saw someone made a post on the Zotac's subreddit saying fans have two conditions to turn on, either if GPU is above 50c or, if it's using more then ~120w.
Also, I don't if different tiers of GPU have higher power threshhold for the fans, a 5070 ti might need 120w but a 5090 maybe its slightly higher (if this is even true)

So it could be the fans are turning on because the GPU is using enough power even tho its below 50c in temp, or perhaps even just a spike happened? I guess multiple monitors with high refresh rate etc could probably make it easier to reach this condition.

Unfortunately I have an old 1060 gpu so I cannot help further but I thought it might be interesting.
This was the post I saw:
 
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Since I am running open case I only have CPU cooler (two NF-A12 fans) at 22% or about 500rpm and then PSU which is 0 rpm at idle. So at idle my system is practically inaudible. And when I was still running the modded RTX 3080 (also with two NF-A12 fans), the system was usually almost quiet even during typical gaming scenarios (much quieter than the minimum rpm at this Inno3D 5080)
Isn't open case counter productive if you value low noise?
 
What RPM is it running at the minimum? You can use HWMonitor to check.
hwinfo is saying 1295 on fan one, 1340ish fan two, 1350ish fan3.
Next time you watch videos/browse internet and the fans randomly turns on, could you check how much power its using and temp?

I saw someone made a post on the Zotac's subreddit saying fans have two conditions to turn on, either if GPU is above 50c or, if it's using more then ~120w.
Also, I don't if different tiers of GPU have higher power threshhold for the fans, a 5070 ti might need 120w but a 5090 maybe its slightly higher (if this is even true)

So it could be the fans are turning on because the GPU is using enough power even tho its below 50c in temp, or perhaps even just a spike happened? I guess multiple monitors with high refresh rate etc could probably make it easier to reach this condition.

Unfortunately I have an old 1060 gpu so I cannot help further but I thought it might be interesting.
This was the post I saw:
In my experience it isn't exactly 50C no. It seems to go up to around 56-57C according to afterburner and hwinfo, fan turns on, the fan drops the temps to low 40s, then turns off again. Rinse and repeat when the GPU slowly makes it back to late 50s again.
Edit: Checked power usage and it just hovers around the same bracket at all times so I don't think it's related.
 
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hwinfo is saying 1295 on fan one, 1340ish fan two, 1350ish fan3.
That really sux for such an expensive card. If you want to get rid of the fans ramping up during "idle" I recommend to try what I did. Just place one 120mm fan (or basically any fan) above the venting area at the backplate and this should should get rid of the problem completely and will also help to reduce rpm /temps during heavy load. Luckily it seems nowadays all 50 series cards have this venting area so it's a cheap workaround as long as you don't mind how it looks.
 
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That really sux for such an expensive card. If you want to get rid of the fans ramping up during "idle" I recommend to try what I did. Just place one 120mm fan (or basically any fan) above the venting area at the backplate and this should should get rid of the problem completely and will also help to reduce rpm /temps during heave load. Luckily it seems nowadays all 50 series cards have this venting area so it's a cheap workaround as long as you don't mind how it looks.
I'm not sure I could even really fit one as my cpu cooler is quite large (noctua d15). I guess I might, but it'd sure be tight.

I think first I'll see if undervolting changes anything when I get round to doing it. I was planning on messing with that anyway
 
Isn't open case counter productive if you value low noise?
It depends. If I were sitting right next to the side which is opened than possibly yes. But since HDDs (the most invasive disruptor of quietness in a PC) can nowadays be avoided, open case is not an issue during idle. And during load the ambient temps in an open case should be always better than temps in a closed case even in a one with good airflow, so the fans need to work little less. With my 3080 which was modded to be quiet, noise was never an issue. That is party because I sit opposite to the opened side of the PC and also some distance from it, so it works for my specific case.
 
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