Video Card Fan Speed

[tifc8lraz]

Hi everyone,

I've had my ATI Radeon 2900PRO video card for...about 2 years now. Just today, I noticed that the fan was spinning much faster than normal and, in turn, was very loud. Gradually, as I stayed on the computer longer, the fan slowed down and returned to normal.

When letting the computer idle while watching TV, I noticed that the fan started acting up again, so I turned the computer off. I took a nap, and then got back up and noticed the fan was still going very rapidly.

HWMonitor is putting the core of the video card at 114F (46C). I can't check the speed of the video card fan through the program though.

 

[dividebyzero]

A foot in both camps? (Your avatar!)

Can you monitor the PCB tempreture ?
Could be that the Vram /VRM are getting hot while the heatpipe is effectively cooling the GPU.
Any dust buildup inside the shroud- I presume the cards running the stock red translucent acrylic blower fan shroud.
When you say it's spinning faster do you mean that it's in 3D mode all the time ?

 

[tifc8lraz]

When you say it's spinning faster do you mean that it's in 3D mode all the time ?

No. This has been happening when I've been doing things like surfing the internet.

 

[dividebyzero]

So it's running at 3D speed when it should be 2D.
When you are in 2D mode (surfing the net, email, word processing etc) -I think for that card 2D mode is 300MHz core, 300MHz memory- and the fan ramps up to full speed is the GPU and memory clock also running at 3D (maximum), or are they still at 2D levels (300/300),
If that is the case then you might have the driver overruling the BIOS presets.

 

[GAGEtheBEAST]

I'm going to say that it is a load of hair/dust...That's the most likely cause.

 

[tifc8lraz]

I decided to check out the video card, and it had a large amount of dust on the fan. I cleaned it, and so far so good.