Arch Linux

adamlau

Member

Registered: 2009-01-30

Posts: 418

Enable Fermi GPU Fan Speed Control Permanently?

GTX 460 SC 768MB + nvidia 265.53 + xorg 1.9.0. Option "Coolbits" "4", or Option "Coolbits" "5" enables GPU fan speed control via nvidia-settings. Is there a known 20-nvidia.conf, or .xinitrc string we could pass to enable fan speed control at a predetermined speed? nvclock doesn't support the 460 as of yet and I just queried the NVIDIA and nV forums...

Last edited by adamlau (2010-10-06 03:43:23)

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Snowknight

Member

Registered: 2009-06-11

Posts: 55

Website

Re: Enable Fermi GPU Fan Speed Control Permanently?

I've searched for a solution for the past several months and haven't found one either. I run a pair of GTX 275 cards, and I, too, would like to set my fan speeds at boot. Nvclock can adjust one of the cards. But I must open nvidia-settings to change both speeds. Annoying as it is, I raise them whenever I want to tax the cards. (nVidia's warning message is much more condescending when you consider that the driver never seems to raise fan speeds above 40% no matter the temperature.)

Nvidia-settings is open source, so it should be possible to patch it to support setting fan speed in the console. Or maybe someone will write another utility.

Snowknight

Member

Registered: 2009-06-11

Posts: 55

Website

Re: Enable Fermi GPU Fan Speed Control Permanently?

Actually, I found a way to do this today. I poked around nvidia-settings's CLI options for a different setting this morning and noticed GPUFanControlState. You can begin to control fan speeds through the CLI with this setting.

Set GPUFanControlState to 1 to enable speed changes, and then use GPUCurrentFanSpeed to set the speed.

nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=1 -a [gpu:0]/GPUCurrentFanSpeed=<insert your fan percentage here>

Of course, you need to set the same values with [gpu:1] if you have a second card. But you can stick that all inside your ~/.xinitrc file and apply the setting when xorg launches. I'll add something about this to the Arch wiki. I'm not sure why I hadn't noticed this option before. It might be a new setting in the beta version of either the blob driver – I have 260.19.06 – or nvidia-settings. Can anyone check that this works with the other, stable nvidia drivers?

Last edited by Snowknight (2010-10-13 16:47:47)

jpapon

Member

Registered: 2010-12-10

Posts: 1

Re: Enable Fermi GPU Fan Speed Control Permanently?

Just in case anyone is wondering why this line doesn't work for them:

nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=1 -a [gpu:0]/GPUCurrentFanSpeed=<insert your fan percentage here>

I don't know if this is only on new drivers, but to adjust the GPUCurrentFanSpeed attribute you need to address the fan, not the gpu (at least on my cards):

nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=1 -a [fan:0]/GPUCurrentFanSpeed=<insert your fan percentage here>

Cheers!