Is low level fan control gone on 30 series cards?

pippenainteasy

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I've been reading up on various 3080/3090 models, and it appears all of them seem to have the default Nvidia reference BIOS limitations of 25-30% minimum fan speed.

On the 20 series (and 10 or 9 series before that) any high end card AFAIK (non-reference 2080/Super/Ti) on MSI Afterburner you could set the fan speeds to anywhere from 0-30%, either manually or on the curve.

But every 3080/3090 thread I've perused looks pretty similar. You either have a 0db "Fan Stop" mode that goes up to around ~55-60C on the default fan curve, or you set a custom curve which disables the 0db fan stop entirely, with a minimum fan speed floor set to around 25-30%.

I compared the EVGA XC3, Asus TUF and PNY XLR8 3080/90 models from friends and they all seem to exhibit this similar behavior. Even the highest end 3090 cards don't seem to have fine fan control allowing you to go below 25-30%.

Did all the AIBs just decide to take full custom fan control away from the end users this generation or something? Seems kind of a hit to quality of life.
 
I've been reading up on various 3080/3090 models, and it appears all of them seem to have the default Nvidia BIOS limitations of 25-30% minimum fan speed.

On the 20 series (and pretty much every generation before that) any high end card AFAIK (non-reference 2080/Super/Ti) on MSI Afterburner you could set the fan speeds to anywhere from 0-30%, either manually or on the curve.

But every 3080/3090 thread I've perused looks pretty similar. You either have a 0db "Fan Stop" mode that goes up to around ~55-60C on the default fan curve, or you set a custom curve which disables the 0db fan stop entirely, with a minimum fan speed of around 25-30% generally.

I compared the EVGA XC3, Asus TUF and PNY XLR8 3080/90 models from friends and they all seem to exhibit this similar behavior. Even the highest end 3090 cards don't seem to have this fine fan control allowing you to go below 25-30%.

Did all the AIBs just decide to take full custom control away from the end users this generation or something? Seems kind of a hit to quality of life.
Quality of life for the card, or your ears? I'll comment on each.

Card? I mean, this is anecdotal, but I've never had a fan go on a video card unless I was DCing with it at a 100% fan speed for years.

Ears? Can 30% even be heard?
 
Quality of life for the card, or your ears? I'll comment on each.

Card? I mean, this is anecdotal, but I've never had a fan go on a video card unless I was DCing with it at a 100% fan speed for years.

Ears? Can 30% even be heard?

Quality of life for a video card is a bit of an contradiction since the term explicitly refers to experience of living beings, and your GPU is not alive. I'm definitely referring to personal quality of life of an end user, in terms of 1) control and 2) SPLs

30% is definitely audible to me above ambient, but I have a pretty quiet setup.
 
The lowest my RTX 2070 goes is 41% its the "founders edition" reference design. Quite frustrating. I wish I could turn it off completely when I'm not using it under a heavy load. The fans don't need to be spinning when on the desktop or browsing the internet.

30% audible? You bet.
 
The lowest my RTX 2070 goes is 41% its the "founders edition" reference design. Quite frustrating. I wish I could turn it off completely when I'm not using it under a heavy load. The fans don't need to be spinning when on the desktop or browsing the internet.

30% audible? You bet.

Yep the reference cards in Turing had a 41% minimum which was annoying. Didn't make any sense because 10-series reference cards had a 27% minimum which was a lot better. But at least the aftermarket cards had full fan control. I don't know why the AIBS took that away in the 30 series.
 
Probably because of the propensity of the fans (motors) to click when stopping and starting. Just a guess.
 
By default, my 3090 FTW3 fans do not run until there is a load, but idle temps with no fans running are about 50C.... so I run a silent fan curve while working, which is 20%~30% depending on temps. Keeps idle at 28C and I can't for the life of me hear any difference between no fans and 30% fans.
 
There is a point where the fan motor falls below usable threshold; the voltage is so low that the fan cannot physically start or maintain spinning. If I had to guess, what you're seeing is that lower limit.

The only solution I can suggest for this is a full custom water loop. Then you have 100% control of fan speed, albeit the fans on the rad(s).
 
Whoever said 30% is not audible must be mental with some of the cards. Buy a decent AIB and it should not be a problem.
 
I have mine on my desk and can't hear the my evga 3080 ftw 3 ultra til about 50%. That is when I was playing around to see how loud it gets. When at default I don't even hear it while gaming.

It's definitely a first world problem. Nobody forced me to buy Noctua A12x25s and a PSU that's fanless until past 350W, but yeah, that's pretty much why 30% idle fan speeds ends up being a problem since it's the only thing generating any noise above ambient on my PC.. I guess that's what the Air Force called Target Creep in Vietnam...

I ended up finding a solution, which was run Auto fan profile when I'm on desktop so fan stop is on, and then remembering to switch to custom fan profile while gaming.
 
Quality of life for a video card is a bit of an contradiction since the term explicitly refers to experience of living beings, and your GPU is not alive.

Not the point of this topic, but I see no reason why the term can't be extended to refer to non-animate objects. We already have QoS in networking, QoL for hardware makes perfect sense as well, unless you want to propose an alternate term. Living language and all that you know.
 
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