XFX 4890 Fan

[Kwisatz Haderach]

I just picked up this card today for an upgrade over my 8800GT. It works great, and is a pretty good upgrade. I just have one question. The fan pulses. The temp is showing idle at 43C. The fan will go from 0 to 50% fan speed for 1.5 seconds and then go back to 0, or at least less than what CCC can monitor. I have to use Riva Tuner just to see than the fan is changing speeds, but I can hear it.

When I run a game, the fan will run constantly as it should. Is it normal for the fan to run up and down like this at idle. It runs up for less than two seconds, and when it goes down in rpm, it stays for 3 or 4 seconds and then speeds up again. MY temps are pretty good, I idle at 43C and Max load at 68C.

Thanks

 

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Bump, is it normal for the card to run the fan up and down like this?

 

[error8]

The fan profiles are set in such a way, that when it reaches 43 C, it speeds up to 55%. While it can be considered normal, I believe that is very annoying. And if we're talking about the reference cooler, then at 55% it should probably scream like crazy.

Download and install ATi tray tools and under "overclocking settings" you'll find a "fan" settings and create a profile, based on temperatures, that won't make the fan pulsate like that.

 

[betasub]

Annoying but normal. Agree with error8's solution.

The fanprofile has your card oscillating between two states, with the upper one kicking in (at a low temperature) with a high fanspeed the quickly forces temps back down to the lower state.

You could try improving case cooling, so that it remains in the lowest state when idle. Or change the fanprofile so that the step temperatures are higher, or the step-up in fanspeed smaller.

 

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Thanks for the update. Actually, the sound is not too bad, I can barley hear it over the other fans running on medium in my Antec Nine Hundred. But it is enough to be annoying, almost give me a motion sickness type feeling. I guess tomorrow, I will set up a Riva Tuner fan profile. I just wanted to make sure that the 43C is the magic number. Its very annoying, but not as bad the the single slot cooler that was on my 8800GT. That was loud. I also thought about just running F@H to keep the temps up in order to keep the fan from running up and down. It keeps giving me an error looking for an Nvidia DLL file, even though I uninstalled F@H and reinstalled it several times. I guess I am going to have to break down and do a clean install to make everything right with Windows.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I actually prefer a fan speed that might be high enough to be audible, even to the point that it's easy to hear. I prefer that to the constant changing speeds/noise. So, you can always set the fan to something like 50% is it's not that annoying to you, and lock it at that speed. On my 4870 with the Sapphire Toxic cooler, 45% is plenty audible, but is also plenty fast to cool the card very well with my overclock. You could always do something similar. Or as other suggested, creating your own fan profiles is certainly a good option as well.

 

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Well, it looks like the auto settings in RivaTuner took care of everything, and I did not even have to mess with setting up fan profiles. The only down side, is now instead of idle fan running up and down, its the top thresh hold while folding. So in a game, it should no have much of a problem. Thanks for the info everyone.