nVidia GE Force 8800 GT Fan Speed

[tmhanser]

I have an nVidia GE Force 8800 GT in a Dell Optiplex 960, Windows 7.

Fan appears to be running at full-speed, even with the correct driver installed (downloaded from nVidia driver support site.) And full speed means SCREAMING.

Normally, on either OS X or Windows the fan runs at full speed during the boot sequence, until the graphics driver loads. Then it idles down to near silence.

This particular card is from XFX, if that makes any difference.

Does this card normally sound like this? The fan blades are clean.

Besides installing third-party utilities to control the fan speed (possible?) is there anything else I can check? This thing is too loud for a small home office.

Thanks.

 

[blackened23]

First, yes, you can use 3rd party software to control the fan speed - EVGA precision and MSI afterburner come to mind. Before doing that, however, keep in mind that your fan is revving to maximum for a reason; the fan defaults to "auto" which is a temperature based adjustment. If you're revving to max that means your GPU temps are too high. So while you can adjust the fan speed, don't do that before fixing the actual problem - what I would suggest doing is unscrewing the GPU shroud and checking under the fans. I'm willing to bet that you have a ton of dust caked inside of the GPU shroud, and you'll need to re-apply TIM to the GPU as well. I had an 8800 long ago with similar issues, dust collects pretty rapidly inside the shroud and will cause the fans to go nuts and temperatures to increase beyond control. If you remove all of the dust caked inside of the shroud, the fan issue should fix itself without having to mess with 3rd party software. (Be sure to re-apply TIM as well).

 

[tmhanser]

Thank you, blackened23.

I just pulled the card, removed the shroud and it is remarkably clean - no dust accumulation at all. I swear this thing has hardly been used, and I bought it second-hand on Amazon.com.

So...what's next? I've never had to install any fan speed utility ever. I even tried this same card in a Mac Pro desktop, installed the correct driver and it did the same thing.

Should I check the GPU temp somehow, before I install EVGA Precision or MSI afterburner?

Thanks again.

 

[tmhanser]

GPU Monitor indicates:

But fan is still blowing FAST.

Thanks.