SPCR

I have it set to 0% in Afterburner, but looking at the fan it's still spinning? How can I get it so that the fan completely stops? I'm using a reference 6950

robollama wrote:I have it set to 0% in Afterburner, but looking at the fan it's still spinning? How can I get it so that the fan completely stops? I'm using a reference 6950

It is unlikely that you will be able to get the fan to stop on the reference AMD HD 6950. Even at idle, that card is using over 20 watts of power. The power supply circuits are always running. The GDDR5 chips run at full speed (AFAIR) even when the GPU is idle. Couple that power use with a closed design, and you need to move air all of the time.

Quiet cards usually have an open design. This lets each memory chip and power transistor/choke have a small amount of cooling based on case airflow. These open cards can sometimes turn their fans off at idle, often that can only be done with a card custom BIOS flash.

You can turn a reference AMD HD 6950 into an open design by buying an aftermarket cooler ($50-90). You could also sell the card and buy a non-reference open card.

If I recall correctly, the reference 6950 will only let its fan speed go down to 20%. I tried BIOS modding to change the fan profile, but it seems that driver settings override once they load. I didn't try other software utilities, so maybe RivaTuner, MSI Afterburner, or something similar will work (I doubt it, though). If it's still too noisy, you may need to opt for a 3rd-party cooler...

Reference 6950 idles at 300mhz memory and 150mhz gpu.

20% is the lowest the fan can go. There was an overclocking tool, I think Sapphire Trixx that allowed it to go lower though. But it may be my memory playing tricks on me.

My Powercolor 6950 2GB can go to 10% fan speed with Afterburner, but it's not quite a reference card as you can see here (this is the 1GB version): http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphi ... html#sect0

If you run dual monitor, which cranks idle clocks up a bit, the blower will even change speed frequently for cooling just with Windows Aero. This drove me crazy and made me find a replacement cooler.

I did use Afterburner to set up a less aggressive RPM curve, but I couldn't go below 20%. The blower motor was the loudest part of my sys even at 20%.