I have the RTX 3060 Ti with a custom built gaming desktop,
with all the latest hardware, about 2 years old now, and use the computer all of the time, and I noticed that with the fan settings on auto for the graphics card it will often heat up to 60+ degrees celsius and stay that hot for many hours while I don’t touch the fan settings and leave them on automatic.
If I manually set the fan speeds from nvidia-settings and bump them up to 50% or 100% the card will cool down to around 30 degrees celsius for general desktop usage, or around 40 if I’m gaming a lot.
The rest of the desktop itself generally has it’s fans on performance mode, or full speed, and when I manually turn up the fans to high speeds all of the components stay nice and cool and I get a noticeable performance boost, but setting the desktops fans from bios does not make a large difference for the nvidia cards temperature. If I leave the desktop fans on full speed, and leave my RTX card’s fans on automatic, then it will get up to 60 degree’s celsius or 70 simply using the computer casually. I don’t even play games with high definition graphics most of the time, leaning towards getting the highest frame rates possible for fps type games and competitive games, with low graphics settings, which otherwise would push the temps even higher.
It occurred to me after my onboard sound card broke recently that even though I’m not using my computer unlike any ordinary user would, that the automatic nvidia settings leave the card running very hot at 140 degrees+ fahrenheit(60+ degrees celsius) for many hours at a time, since I use the desktop all the time, and that that high automatic heat can potentially damage the other sensitive components of my desktop.
Now I don’t have an unusual setup, but I do probably use the desktop more often than most people do… I don’t have more than one graphics card, and only two hard drives, so there isn’t anything else that would create undue heat that could potentially damage my hardware.
Anyways I just wanted to share this observation with you guys, that I think the card is running hot automatically, and starts to suffer performance wise, with the automatic fan settings on, compared to manually turning them up to faster speeds, where it runs butter smooth.
I’ve been gaming on linux for many years now, after… gaming on windows for many years, and it’s a giant pain we have to do so much manual labor to achieve the same kind of performance we get on windows with merely pointing and clicking. On linux, we have to pay attention to every little detail of our systems configuration it seems, and alter text files, and learn about all the underlying details of programming and interfaces, whereas on windows we can click the +performance boost button, and everything is done automatically for us.
I also am curious to see what anyone knows about the power draw of nvidia cards, on linux compared to windows, and specifically, how it differs between different cards. I have seen that some people get great performance out of their cards on linux, which coincides with their card demonstrating it is drawing the max power, whereas other people with different cards that do not draw max power, get worse performance, which leads me to believe that some cards do not perform similarly as others on linux, despite having the same drivers.
Anyways here is also a picture of a cat and an nvidia card to brighten your day. Happy holidays ; D
