So I bought a second hand GTX 260 a few weeks ago for my Hackintosh. It's a great card and still handles most modern games quite well, not that I play them often. Anyway when I bought it the fan was constantly maxing out under load and the cooler was too hot to touch. I opened the card and it was packed full of dust, I cleaned it and applied the recommended amount of thermal paste and put it back together. I've been using it since then with no problems and it's a lot quieter but it never seems to get really quiet or really loud. Using a few utilities in my Windows 8 partition I've noticed that the GPU fan seems to be locked at 40% and never changes, ever, even under 100% load in stress tests. What can I do about this? I need to get it sorted because A: It's a little too loud when idle and B: because I'm using a Power Mac G4 case my cooling options are limited and I don't want to cook the card (although it rarely goes above 60c under load which I think is acceptable). Granted I could just force it using some utilities in Windows but I use my Mac partition 99% of the time and with a lot of Adobe apps on the go using CUDA, I'd quite like to have dynamic cooling on the go. Also this is clearly not normal behaviour. Is it hardware or software? To me is seems to be a hardware issue as it does it in both OS X and MS. Any help appreciated, thanks.
Not really sure how I'd go about that or what to look for. All I know is that before I cleaned it, it would spin up and down accordingly. Now it doesn't. Thermal Paste problem? EDIT: Using Nvidia Utilities I can force it to any speed I want but as soon as I set the driver back to Auto it just goes down to 40% I played BioShock Infinite on max settings for 3 hours and it never picked up speed and yet the PCI Slot cooler I have sitting next to it was pumping out more and more heat.
Odd question but did you check for any thermal sensors under the cover? You might have missed one (if there was one) and that is what's locking the speed.
GPU-Z will allow you to dump the BIOS and let you check out the specs on your card. I'd suggest uploading the BIOS using GPU-Z as well as they have a database of them.
Use EVGA Precision X, you can change the GPU fan speed and can configure what speed you want for a specific temperature.
Works great on my Windows partition but I'm still stuck without a solution for Mac. I'd just like it to behave the way it's meant to. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter too much. I've been having some marathon CS:GO sessions with it and it hasn't hiccuped yet (I do have a PCI slot extraction fan sitting right next to it). I'll be upgrading the card as soon as I have some ££, let's just hope it survives until then and I can always hack my HD2500 to work off the processor should it die.
Id just get the latest bios for the card from the gpu-z db and flash it. As APE said - sounds like someones modified the fan profiles.
Ok will give that a try. But, before I cleaned it, the card would spin up to maximum revs when running a high spec game due to the fact that it was so clogged it was overheating (I couldn't even touch it, it was so hot). So that leads me to believe that it was behaving normally and now it's not. There's nothing to the card when opened so I haven't missed a cable or a connection or anything.
You can set profiles, so high speed (for high heat) is still max, but idle speed is higher... etc etc Flashing a stock bios would at least rule all that out
sounds like one of two things. 1. as mentioned some-one has screwed with the bios - flashing stock would rule that out as per Bad_Ad84's suggestion 2. the sensor has burnt out or a component on the fan controller circuit has went bad. this has happened on a card i had before a resistor died and was unable to control fan speed. other options if the flashing doesn't fix the problem: aftermarket cooling, or hooking it up to a fan controller.
Ok so I've dumped the original as a backup. I'm browsing GPU-Z and there are about 12 different bioses for my card, looking at the details all of them appear to have fanspeed set at 100% on the lowest performance levels, that can't be right. http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/...260&interface=PCI-E&memType=GDDR3&memSize=896 Third entry up from the bottom appears to match the current specs of my card. So are these entries stock entries or just custom files people have uploaded?
Ok, it looks like in the later Nvidia cards, they run at 100% all the time via the bios and the driver throttles it. So that makes it a driver issue on your PC....
Great success!! I took a gamble and flashed the bios with the GPU-Z bios matching the same hardware identifier and clock speeds as my card. Flash was a success and after running the stress test the fan speed started to rise which it's never done before since the clean. So that that problem solved!! Thanks for the help everyone.
