Possible solutions to the 7800GT/7900GT fan problems?

[Live]

jmke from www.madshrimps.be writes in his latest VGA Cooler Roundup April 2006:

The FAN control issue

In the last 2 months I?ve used three 7800GT cards from different manufacturers, while packaging and overall design were slightly different, all of them displayed the same anomaly when it came down to fan speed control. First I installed one from MSI, the fan was spinning at 100% at all times and I could not get it to slow down, several driver reinstalls later the problem still remained, the fan runs at 100% in all states either 2D or 3D. During an unrelated test I unplugged the fan on the MSI card and plugged it back in while the system was running, the fan did not spin up to 100% and I was able to control the fan speed through Rivatuner.

The next 7800GT card I tried was from XFX, it gave me the same symptom as the MSI, 100% fan speed at all times, then randomly after xx reboots the fan control came to life and fan speed throttled to 25% when in 2D.

To make things complete I tried an e-VGA 7800GT CO which features a larger copper base but the same fan, it also ran at 100% from the start, removing all nVidia drivers from the system and cleaning with Driver Cleaner Pro and reinstalling the latest ones from the nVidia.com site enabled the fan throttling on the e-VGA.

Apparently I?m not the only one experiencing these problems as there are numerous forum posts over the web from people who bough a 7800GT card and found it to be very loud. Gainward posted a hardware-hack workaround for the problem which can seen here.

I have not been able to confirm if any of the suggested solutions actually work for me or if they work for 7900GT cards at all. But I figured they look interesting enough to give them a try. Please report back if you try the tips out or have alternative solutions.

I really hope some of these options work or Nvidia really ****** me up good. Nvidia quality control seems to be really out of control