NVIDIA Graphics Card Fan Speed Control

English Hardware
#1

I’m running openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME. I have an EVGA nvidia GTX 285 installed, which is equipped with a variable speed fan. I’m running the nvidia driver package which includes the nvidia X Server Settings utility. The utility allows me to view the fan speed as a percentage of its maximum speed but does not allow adjustment. It appears that the speed remains at the card default of 40% regardless of GPU or card temp. When running certain graphic-intensive applications my card runs quite hot (sometimes >70 degrees C). Although this isn’t hot enough to burn the card up in the short term, it is certainly hot enough to shorten my video card’s lifespan.

So, the question is how do I set up my system so I can increase the fan speed to 50% or better yet, get it to increase as the GPU temp increases? The nvidia X Server Settings help indicates that fan speed is adjustable after enabling coolbits, but coolbits is not installed on my system and is not available from the default repositories. What is the easiest way to obtain, install and enable coolbits? I have no intention of overclocking my card. It was too expensive to risk damage to the card.

All info and advice is appreciated. Thanks.

#2

The most promising might be: GNOME Sensors Applet Homepage

Packages for Factory are available at software.opensuse.org, or you could build it yourself which might be a pain due to all the Gnome dependencies, etc.

You might want to look at pwmconfig for controlling fans, though I’ve never got it to work.

NVclock used to let you do this too, but it has not been updated in a while and does not work with newer GPUs, which is too bad:
NVClock - Nvidia overclocking on Linux!

Lews Therin

#3

Thanks Lews. I visited the link, downloaded the packages and followed the instructions provided as best I could, before concluding that I don’t have enough knowledge to install and configure this utility. Hopefully this functionality will be added as a regular supported package in the future.

#4

Actually, I decided to look into this a bit further as I’ve had some questions about thermal management on Nvidia GPUs.

I pulled together information from the Nvidia forums and excellent Gentoo Wiki and created a summary at:

Nvidia-Settings - Lyceum

That should have what you need.

Cheers,
Lews Therin

#5

First I would like to thank you Lews for taking the time to look into this. I followed the instructions on the page you linked to, adjusting the URL of the Nvidia configuration page to match the version of the driver package I’m running. Since I’m running 275.21 for Linux-x86_64, the specific URL for my driver is Appendix

Here is what that page indicated regarding configuration of the xorg.conf.install file:

When "4" (Bit 2) is set in the "Coolbits" option value, the nvidia-settings Thermal Monitor page will allow configuration of GPU fan speed, on graphics boards with programmable fan capability.

So, following the instructions, I inserted <Option “Coolbits” “4” in each “Device” Section (see below). It should be noted that this file is read-only for everyone except root, so I logged into root in order to do this. The bottom line is making this change did not allow me to adjust my fan speed in NVIDIA X Server Settings. I also tried adjusting it using terminal commands and that produced an unspecified error. However, I did notice that my fan speed does go about 40%, but only if the temp reaches 75C. Is there something obvious I did wrong?

Thanks,
Don

Section “Device”
Identifier “vboxvideo”
Driver “vboxvideo”
Option “Coolbits” “4”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “vboxvideo”
Device “vboxvideo”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “vmware”
Driver “vmware”
Option “Coolbits” “4”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “vmware”
Device “vmware”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “cirrus”
Driver “cirrus”
Option “Coolbits” “4”
EndSection
Section “Screen”
Identifier “cirrus”
Device “cirrus”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “fbdev”
Driver “fbdev”
Option “Coolbits” “4”
EndSection
Section “Screen”
Identifier “fbdev”
Device “fbdev”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “vesa”
Driver “vesa”
Option “Coolbits” “4”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “vesa”
Device “vesa”
EndSection

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout”
Screen “vboxvideo”
Screen “vmware”
Screen “cirrus”
Screen “fbdev”
Screen “vesa”
EndSection