I’ve recently bought a Gainward GeForce GTX 1070 Phoenix (the non-OC version), which exhibits some issues:
As with all GTX 1070 the fan will be off when the temperature is low. The temperature then slowly rises to 52-53°C where the fan suddenly revs up to ~900rpm (~34%). Then it immediately turns off, only to repeat every 3-4 seconds. Besides being really annoying to listen to this seems rather harmful for the fans. I’m guessing the fan control was written by someone who’s never heard of hysteresis, but I’m not sure whether to blame NVIDIA or Gainward (for now I’ve settled for being a bit pissed off with both).
If I enable fan settings with Coolbits and set the fan speed manually it still misbehaves when the temperature is around 52-53°C. If I set the fan speed to say 15%, it will run the fan at 15%, then suddenly rev up to 34% for a moment, turn off the fan for a moment, then return to 15%.
My solution so far has been to just set the fan speed to 28% when not gaming, which is inaudible in my setup and keeps the GPU at ~42°C when idle. When starting a game I just turn off the fan settings, since the default fan curve works just fine under load. I’ll code some automatic way of doing this eventually, but it would be nice if it was possible to somehow set a minimum fan speed (or, you know, having the fan just work correctly).
One exacerbating issue is probably that I use two monitors, so as usual the performance level is firmly stuck on 3, i.e. max. That’s unfortunate since the GPU clock never goes below 911MHz (out of 1911MHz) and the memory clock is stuck on max. But from what I understand this is the intended behaviour and will not be fixed (it’s apparently the same on Windows). If I disable one monitor it works as expected, and the GPU and memory can both go all the way down to minimum.
I can force the performance level to 0 using PowerMizerLevel in Xorg options, but then it’s stuck on 0 instead. Level 0 with the GTX 1070 is for the record enough to play Skyrim with decent settings using wine, so why the driver has to force level 3 just because of an extra monitor is beyond me.
Some system information:
Core i7 5820K @ stock
Asus X99-A
32GB DDR4 2400MHz
Arch Linux with NVIDIA 378.13 and Linux 4.10.6
Monitors: LG 27UD88-W and Dell P2415Q (both 4K)
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (150 KB)