My GPU fan is unnecessarily loud especially when the computer is idle & GPU temperature as reported by nvidia-smi is 35C.
I’ve seen reference to setting Coolbits=4 and similar values in xorg.conf to achieve this but nothing that explains what 4 actually implies, and also nothing that explains if any further changes are needed to actually set a lower fan speed, or change related thresholds.
Has anybody already been through this process, or has a pointer to useful docs?
FWIW here’s what I’ve tried so far:
# /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/hardware.conf
# added coolbits 4 and restarted
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "Coolbits" "4"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
this enables additional settings in the nvidia-settings xorg program,
including the Thermal Settings tab under GPU 0.
this has “Enable GPU Fan Settings” tick box and a “Fan 0 Speed” slider,
however setting this makes no changes in audible fan speed, whether at
Max 100% or default 30%. Given how fans work I’d expect to notice both
the sound, and a definitive change in reported temperature.
The other thing I tried is the same setting via the terminal:
~> nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=1 -a [fan:0]/GPUTargetFanSpeed=30 -c unix:0.0
Attribute 'GPUFanControlState' (unix:0[gpu:0]) assigned value 1.
Attribute 'GPUTargetFanSpeed' (unix:0[fan:0]) assigned value 30.
which shows the corresponding UI changes immediately updating.
Given my GPU is basically here to provide a bunch of xterms and a browser running,
and nvidia-settings reports GPU Utilisation as 0% most of the time, I’d expect to
be hearing almost nothing, as per http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-ti,4787-7.html and similar reviews.
What am I missing here?
I’ve successfully trained the mainboard to keep quiet, and the GPU is the remaining piece of the puzzle.
thanks BTW the FreeBSD support has worked almost completely OOTB which is super impressive. Delighted with my choice so far :D
software: FreeBSD 12.0-current amd64 using drm-next kernel and some customer network patches,
along with latest ports, from FreeBSD package repo.
nvidia-driver-384.59 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for hardware OpenGL rendering
nvidia-settings-378.13_1 Display Control Panel for X NVidia driver
nvidia-xconfig-378.13 Tool to manipulate X configuration files for the NVidia driver