Modern video cards come in two flavors. The noisy ones that have lots of horsepower and the silent ones that trade some of the horsepower for a reduced noise level. This is currently changing with the release of the Nvidia Geforce 8600GT but most users have an older video card in their computer.
My 6600 GT was making lots of noises that were driving me crazy. I could not understand why it was necessary to run the fan in full speed when writing a blog post like this. I was able to reduce the fan speed using the software Rivatuner which has fan profiles for 2D, low power 3D and 3D modes.
Reducing the fan speed is not possible for every video card. I had to update the bios of my last video card to be able to reduce the fan speed. My suggestion is to load Rivatuner and see if you can change the fan speeds to reduce the noise of your video card. Here is how you do that:
Begin by downloading and installing Rivatuner. Once that is done run the software, you will see the following screen.
Click on Customize in the Driver settings block. A overlay menu should appear with several icons, click on the first entitled System Settings. This will load another menu with several tabs. The second tab is called Fan and that is where you can reduce the fan speed for the different modes.
I suggest to play around with the settings a little bit. I would leave the performance 3D setting at 100% and reduce the other two settings. In my case I have given them the values 40% and 50% respectively. Make sure that you monitor temperatures of your video card when applying this settings. You have to make sure that it is running stable with this reduced fan speeds.
Click on Apply fan settings at Windows startup. This ensures that fan speed will be reduced during Windows startup to lower the noise when working with Windows.
Rivatuner has an option to monitor the temperature of the video card. Click on ok to leave that menu so that you see the main menu again. Click the Customize link at the Target Adapter setting and select Hardware Monitoring from the list. Now click on the red dot in the left bottom corner. This starts hardware monitoring and will report the temperature of the video card if it has a thermal diode.
Related posts:
- Create Video Card Profiles To Save Power And Reduce Noise
- How to reduce the fan speed of the Nvidia Geforce 6600 GT
- RivaTuner 2.0 Final
- Lower the noise of your hard drives
- The most annoying pc noise makers
- Decrease Noise Of LCD Displays
- Acer Aspire One Fan Control
- Hard Drive Noise Reduction
Thanks for the very quick response to my request for this!
Unfortunately, my ATI Radeon X1900 XT doesn’t seem to be as well supported as NVIDIA cards; I only have one slider for fan control.
However, that still allowed me to control the fan manually to check the noise levels – and it seems the GPU fan is not the noisiest element in my PC. So I’ll look into controlling the other candidates (PSU and CPU fans, maybe even HDDs) to eventually reduce the overall noise level.
Hehe, lucky me using a passively cooled Asus GF EN7300GT Silent :D
Program stops responding everytime i do anything with it?