Bad GPU fans?

R

Rev. Night

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 30, 2004
Messages
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I recently bought a used EVGA 3080 FTW Ultra and at around 40-50% pwm, I often hear this grinding noise. I know its coming from the gpu because when I manually turn the fans down to 0, the fans stop, and the noise goes away. I put the fans at 20% or 70% and the noise also goes away. Only around 50%.

I know I can reach out to evga, but is there something local I can be doing? Remove the fan shroud, spray them with something? I do remember a while ago reading that is the opposite of what you should do since these fans are self contained?


View: https://youtube.com/shorts/kH92lf0KW4M?si=e6U59RGq5obCyft4
 
Are any of the fan blades dirty? It's probably a combination of worn bearings and an imbalance in the fan blades. You can try cleaning them, but the real fix is probably to replace the fan harness with a new one.
 
ughhh. so this is something that confuses me. Furious_Styles (the H who I bought this gpu from) sent me the fans from EVGA that were RMAd. 3 brand new fans. They come with a page that describes how to simply install them (not hard).

I do that, turn the pc back on, and the sound is still there. That grinding or whatever is still there.

The fans are self contained, so it's not like I am putting a fan on a pre-existing axel that spins it. So if the 3 previous fans were 'bad', the likely hood that all 3 of the new fans being bad is very low. So whats the issue?

Apparently, the fans really don't like being told to work under the 30% threshold that is apparently their PWM minimum. This, to me, is a design flaw. I am using EVGAs own Precision X1, selecting either the Quiet or Stealth fan curves. The Stealth fan curve goes from 0-20% at the start, so the EVGAs own software puts it in the grinding sound range.

I can use Argus and have the fans be 0% until 50C then jump straight to 30%, but sometimes there is still the grinding/clicking.

wtf evga
 
Gotta be the fan blades hitting something, or it's rubbing up against the shroud. A piece of plastic sticking out where you can't see it?
 
Fan blades aren't hitting anything. If they were, the sound wouldn't go away at higher rpms
 
Rev. Night said:
Fan blades aren't hitting anything. If they were, the sound wouldn't go away at higher rpms
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I had a Gigabyte Windforce 3080 do this. At certain rpm’s it clicked, not so much a rubbing sound. But anywhere else outside that rpm range and it was fine. Turned out it wasn’t really ever a problem, just a quirk with what type of fans were used.
 
its super annoying. I was able to get rid of it 90% by a fan curve, and I only somewhat heard it doing a game demo. still seems like a design defect to me
 
IME, EVGA's fans suck. Even when smooth running, they are not quiet (I blame half of this on the logo being embosseed all over the blades), and their overall shape/design is not efficient. So they have to spin up really high, to be effective.

But yeah, they also usually have at least a fair bit of motor and/or bearing noise.
 
Ahh! The ol' classic Evga fan grinding when turning on and off. Totally normal and annoying. If you want it to vanish set afterburner to 40% and it will run without that sound. It's just how they are designed.
 
isnt it something to do with how may poles the motor has? low number poles = ticking noise?
 
Rvenger said:
Ahh! The ol' classic Evga fan grinding when turning on and off. Totally normal and annoying. If you want it to vanish set afterburner to 40% and it will run without that sound. It's just how they are designed.
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That does work. I had mine above 40 also with a 2080ti EVGA card and it solved the issue.
 
Rev. Night said:
It's three 92mm fans. Two 120s would be less coverage right? (276 vs 240)
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Not just the size matters. The blade design, shape, number of blades, curvature and other stuff matter more. If size were the best factor there would only be cards with 120mm’s strapped to them, and that’s rare now. Triple 92mm is much more common.
 
Rev. Night said:
It's three 92mm fans. Two 120s would be less coverage right? (276 vs 240)
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Nope, think 𝝅r^2. Dual 120's fit these cards phenomenally well. Running Noctua's on mine and it's basically dead silent, and makes a huge difference in thermals. Mostly did it to get rid of the horribly annoying EVGA fans clicking, but the thermal performance was a huge bonus.

IMG_20230110_220549953.jpg
 
so funny enough i did exactly that on my 5700xt. It was an AIB card, so I could easily remove the fans. On my 6700xt and now 7900xtx, both are reference. Yes, reference cards now have triple fans, but the coolers are more integrated with them. This means you can't quite remove the oem fans and have things look/act great.

Now for my 3080, it's being mounted on an external case on the wall. So looks do matter here.
 
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