GTX 1070 Fans turn on and off continually, is it Bad?

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Kato1144

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 18, 2007
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I was playing some good old AVP2 on my rig a few months back and the game was having frame rate issues because my GPU kept down clocking because of the low load (AVP2 is a real old game) so i turned off the GPU down clocking and she has been running at 1632MHz core when idle for that last few months, anyway I was in GPU z and noticed the GPU fan is turning on and off multiple times a minute.

I have looked online to see if this is bad for the fan motors but all i could find was people complaining about this happening to them when they have shadow play on and such, so i was wondering if any one here would know if the fans are ok with this or is it slowly killing them?

in the mean time I'm going to run a custom fan profile for MSI afterburner, i would rather not mess with the fan profiles (I had a bad experience with MSI afterburner almost destroying a HD6950 fan blower it some how set to 100% over night, the fan was not quite the same after)
 
everything its ok.. no issues, that's how Aftermarket coolers are designed the last few years a feature that turn off the fans when the GPU is below 60C, as you disabled the downclock the card never go into idle state so it never reach lower temps as it normally would do causing constantly to turn on/turn off the fans, but aside from that everything is ok.. no damage will be caused to the fans, no more harm that what actually can cause to have the card constantly at 3D clocks as it never idle.
 
ya i did create a custom fan curve but decided in the end just to go back to allowing the GPU to down clock, i figured if i'm going to do retro gaming like AVP2 i will just change the power profile again.

The only reason i asked in the first place is I know with other electric motors if you start and stop the motor a bunch in short intervals it is really bad for the motor and it will eventually kill it, I know this is true for things like air conditioners and the ones i have actually have a timer on the compressor motor so you can't have them turn on and off like mentioned before
 
if the fans ramp up overtime to desired amount and then ramp back down, not so bad, but the abrupt start and stop is VERY hard on fan bearings. I personally have had 2 cards have their cooling fans wear out and fail for this very reason in cases that were actually keeping things reasonably cool as well.

They just want you to buy new fans, cause we all know there is a massive amount of aftermarket fans available at dirt cheap prices LMAO.

I use Afterburner and never had an issue with it, if the gpu flaked out and the fan got to 100%, pretty sure that was a problem with the gpu drivers or an overclocked NOT stable setting, I have had this happen before, would hate for it to take place when I was not around or sleeping, but alas, user error will kill things (not saying you did it, just going from my own experiences, unstable overclock or bad gpu drivers will cause a "reset" which 99% of time with the older gen cards locks everything up until you force shutdown which is terrible for everything!)
 
dragonstongue said:
if the fans ramp up overtime to desired amount and then ramp back down, not so bad, but the abrupt start and stop is VERY hard on fan bearings. I personally have had 2 cards have their cooling fans wear out and fail for this very reason in cases that were actually keeping things reasonably cool as well.

They just want you to buy new fans, cause we all know there is a massive amount of aftermarket fans available at dirt cheap prices LMAO.

I use Afterburner and never had an issue with it, if the gpu flaked out and the fan got to 100%, pretty sure that was a problem with the gpu drivers or an overclocked NOT stable setting, I have had this happen before, would hate for it to take place when I was not around or sleeping, but alas, user error will kill things (not saying you did it, just going from my own experiences, unstable overclock or bad gpu drivers will cause a "reset" which 99% of time with the older gen cards locks everything up until you force shutdown which is terrible for everything!)
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Ya the fan was turning on and off every few seconds, you are the only one to say this is a bad thing and will shorten the life of my fan, unfortunately this has been going on for probably 2 months before i noticed, hopefully the damage is minimal.

as for the HD6950 getting stuck at 100% fan speed overnight, that happened with a overclock on the core back in 2013, i was mining bit coin for a short bit back then and I woke up the next morning to find my GPU fan just screaming after that i have been wary for the fan control on MSI Afterburner, perhaps it was not Afterburners fault after all
 
not the fan controller problem, the driver/overclock was the problem :)

It is truthful, fast ramp up puts a "shock" on the bearing, I suppose no different than a standard electrical or mechanical motor of any sort, the cavitation effect of the fluid caused by the sudden massive demand of the ramp up, puts strain on it, I have read about this many times in the past, some bearing types probably does not affect much at all, but other types, given enough time you can hear the bearing "grind" when fast up from a low rpm or fast down from high rpm (though not nearly as bad as dead stop or dead start of course)

I know it shortens the life from experience, as well I also know from a different aspect, the fans of any type of course are meant for a specific RPM, any motor to have at redline is bad for it, let alone if it goes OVER the redline which it was not built for, manually spinning the fan like say using a vacum cleaner and not holding the fan from stopping it from spinning forcefully DOES cause damage, I have "killed" fans in the past doing more or less exactly this, but lets say in theory the fan will never exceed its redline example 3000RPM, no motor likes spinning at redline nor do they like crud such as dust or whatever to get jammed in them, fans on heatsinks of any type will get crud in them unless there is 0 way for this to happen, which, does not happen in my experience, extra friction, redline, shock from the cavitation of not spinning fast to spinning at max back to not spinning fast, it adds up.

4870 fan dies because of the up and down constant for 1.5 years or so, the 6870 started grinding noise before I decided to change the cooler for one can easily replace the fans on (obviously not as pretty looking, but works far better as well)

I know there are some custom models that use fans that ramp up % at a time and will get faster and faster as needed instead of massive jumps which is hard on ANY engine really.

I suppose some are replacing their graphics cards or whatever fast enough they do not see the damage. I verge on rather a flat does not ramp up and down at all, and if you find is running a little hotter than you prefer, adjust so is a higher % FLAT or at least have custom fan curve so the fan is able to spool up over an extended range vs the massive jump up and down many seem to do.

I use MSI Afterburner, even if you do NOT overclock, manual/custom fan control is not a bad thing IMHO seeing as many makers of these things do not optimize the fan curves very well if at all.

I noticed with 4870 and 6870 when the card freaked out and ran at its highest in a lockup state sounded higher than me manually forcing at 100% so maybe it was exceeding redline cause drivers could not tell it otherwise, I do not build these things obviously :D

Anyways best of luck to you ^.^
 
I had a similar issue my GTX 1070. One of my card fans would stop spinning while gaming, temps would sky rocket and fans would kick in at 100%, fan stops again and start again. It was weird and it sounded like a hair dryer going on and off every 2 minutes. Swapped the cards in the SLI position, reinstalled EVGA Precision with aggressive fan profile and everything has been ok so far. The default fan profiles had the fans stop spinning at idle. Now I keep the fans on constantly.
 
Everything is fine, just adjust your fan curve. AVP 2 is probably not heating the video card up enough for constant fan activity. I've had this issue also on my 980 playing old games.

You can use MSI afterburner to do that. Try 20% fan speed @ 20c. That should keep your fans spinning even when playing old games.

It's also a good idea if you play a lot of older games, monitor the temps of you video card while playing them. Figure out an average temperature, adjust your fan speed accordingly, then create a custom fan profile for those old games. That's what I do.

Finally, go into your control panel and set in 3d settings "prefer maximum performance" that should keep the card from downclocking, if you want to go that route.
 
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