Been wondering if there is an advantage to running the fans at 90-100%. Usually use auto with a setpoint of 60°, so with the summer almost here, I hoped to see an improvement.
Did a test running all my cards at 91%, hoping for a big change. However, many cards didn’t show much of an improvement. Many had less than 5° improvement. Not sure if this might be that the environment doesn’t allow a lower temper (maybe 45° is the minimum I can get). Could also be that the card is in a slot that doesn’t allow for better temperatures. Usually, this is the case with the end cards
However, I was wondering if it might be manufacturer related since their designs don’t have a good airflow:
There doesn’t seem to be much improvement with 3 fans compared to 2 fans for gigabyte. The MSI unit keeps the temperature low normally, but at full blast, it is a marginal improvement. The best overall is a 3 fan Sapphire card. Maybe it couldn’t do any better probably because of the ambient temperature(?).
Gigabyte doesn’t seem to keep the temperature low unless at higher fan speeds. Usually hope these to be under 60%. The palit cards normally use low fan speeds, don’t show much improvement at full speed. The Zotac cards seem to be the ones that have the highest gain at full blast.
However, there doesn’t seem to be much to gain from running the fans at their top speed. Though I would love to keep the cores in the fifties, 60° should be low enough to ensure an adequate life. The hotspot is probably 10–15° higher, so still an acceptable temperature for semiconductors.
Guess there isn’t much sense in running the fans at full speed, since they wear out faster, and don’t cool that much more. However, more important, you still have some headroom if the ambient temperature increases. The opposite argument could be that fans are cheap. Also no need to worry about temperatures since you are keeping the card as cool as possible. Not wearing out the fans and the extra power is probably better for the coming months.
||||T1|fan 1|T2|fan 2|∆T|# fans|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8192 MB|Gigabyte|Samsung |52|91%|61|69%|9| 3 |
|GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8192 MB|Gigabyte|Samsung |53|91%|60|72%|7||
|GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8192 MB|MSI|Hynix |51|91%|57|38%|6| 3 |
|GeForce RTX 3060 12288 MB|Palit|Samsung |54|91%|60|47%|6||
|GeForce RTX 3060 12288 MB|Palit|Samsung |56|91%|60|52%|4||
|Radeon RX 6700 XT 12272 MB|Sapphire|Samsung |45|89%|48|49%|3| 3 |
|GeForce RTX 3060 12288 MB|Zotac|Samsung |50|91%|60|64%|10||
|GeForce RTX 3070 8192 MB|Zotac|Samsung |52|91%|60|64%|8||
|GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8192 MB|Zotac|Hynix |47|91%|59|37%|12||
|||average|51|91%|58|55%|7||