Anything for videocard fan speed control in Win9x?

[Nazo]

I set up a partition to run Windows 98 SE after one time too many with troubles trying to play some old games in Windows XP (I love XP and all, but it just doesn't get along with old stuff -- especially DOS based things...) Things are generally working, and I found a driver that seems to work for my videocard ok, though I do get crashing after some hour or so of playing Deus Ex. The thing is, I probably don't have to point out that an X850XT-PE runs pretty warm and to make things worse it has been pretty hot outside lately and my A/C broke some time ago, so atm I'm afraid to even do much until late at night. The thing is, by default they set these cards to run the fan speed fairly low -- which I admit makes some sense since the stock heatsink on these things sounds like a jet plane racing against a hurricane if you set them anywhere near to full speed. Still, the default speed is pretty bad IMO and raising it might help with stability a fair bit with some of the instability I've seen.

So I was wondering if there isn't anything out there that will let me change the fan speed on a video card, but which is also compatible with Windows 9x (I'm aware of things like ATITool, but so far haven't found one of those types of tools that actually allows you to even so much as run the installer in Win9x, much less the actual program itself.) The problem is, about the time that video cards started providing control over the fan speed, people started more or less officially deciding to stop supporting Windows 9x, so it's pretty hard to find many tools for video cards past the Radeon 9x00 generation that can do more than controlling the basics like antialiasing settings. I'd prefer a software solution, but, it did occur to me that speed is usually set in the video card's BIOS before anything else touches it, so I am wondering if there are tools to modify an X850XT-PE's BIOS or even modified BIOSes that just simpy raise the fan speed and change nothing else. In particular, I'd rather not have any overclocking by BIOS -- especially the memory is out of the question as if I raise it even by even some 3MHz or so it goes unstable, though it is shockingly stable at its stock speed for such a tight margin.

 

[Nazo]

Come on, I can't be the only one to ever use Win9x with a videocard with fan speed control?

 

[leSLIe]

i don´t think that u can do that, the fan has a fixed speed, and the card doesn´t allow the user to change the rpms, u might try getting an aftermarket cooling solution

 

[Nazo]

i don´t think that u can do that, the fan has a fixed speed, and the card doesn´t allow the user to change the rpms, u might try getting an aftermarket cooling solution

I guess you don't have much experience with the later Radeon or Geforce generations. Most modern video cards actually have fan speed controls now. It is a fairly recent change, but a very nice one considering that some (such as the X800/X850 series) come with fans that REQUIRE this control as they are far too loud at the maximum speeds. My father recently upgraded his system and acquired two Geforce cards (I have troubles remembering if they were 6200s or 6600s) and their fans were quite loud as well, so it became necessary to modify the fan speed for his system as well, and it was sucessful with the fan speeds dropping to a considerably more acceptable rate, so I know that it is not just Radeons that have the ability to control their own fan speeds now.

The problem I am running into is the fact that this innovation is far too new. Most had already begun to fully switch to Windows 2000 and Windows XP by the time video cards began to even think of such support. By the time it became common enough for any software to allow overriding this control, no one officially supported Windows 9x anymore as far as I know. It is my hope that there is either a peice of software that was made during the transition period supporting it (perhaps an old version of ATITool I haven't been able to track down yet?) or that there is perhaps a peice of software made after to provide support for Windows 9x (which, believe it or not, sometimes happens. For example, there are drivers to provide Windows 98 with UMS support.)