Turing (RTX) Linux CLI Fan Control

[Gorgon]

Did some poking around using the current 418 drivers from the Canonical PPA and Nvidia has changed the model with the RTX cards. In the past with dual fan cards on Pascal (GTX) both cards were driven by and reporting on a single channel. With RTX and Nvidia moving from a blower style reference card with one fan to a dual fan design each of the fans can now be individually addressable.

So [fan0] and [fan1] refer to the two fans in the first card and [fan2] and [fan3] refer to the fans in the second card and so forth.

So when you are using nvidia-settings to adjust the fan speed you should adjust both fans at the same time.

 

To Display the current fan speeds:

nvidia-settings -t -q [fan:0]/GPUCurrentFanSpeedRPM -q [fan:1]/GPUCurrentFanSpeedRPM -q [fan:2]/GPUCurrentFanSpeedRPM -q [fan:3]/GPUCurrentFanSpeedRPM

nvidia-smi, however, still reports the fan speed as a percentage but only for the first fan on a card.
 

To enable manual fan control and set the fans:

nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=1 -a [fan:0]/GPUTargetFanSpeed=60 -a [fan:1]/GPUTargetFanSpeed=50

Of interest is there now appears to be a bit mask setting to set the reference for the Fan Control to a combination of GPU, Memory and Power presumably using internal temperature sensors for the GPU, Memory and VRMs. This may be of interest if one were to modify the card and install a GPU block covering just the GPU then one fan header could be tied to GPU for the pump and radiator fan and the other header tied to Memory and Power and tied to a cooling fan for the other components.

 

Some lower-end cards don't implement this but if you are having trouble using nvidia-settings to manually adjust your fans then you can try this.

[Gorgon]

As a side note in systems with mixed Pascal and Turing Cards the Pascal Cards will still have only one addressable fan block per card whereas the Turing GPUs will have two addressable fans.

 

So in a system with a Pascal Card as GPU0 and Turing as GPU1 the Pascal fans would be controllable as [fan:0] and the Turing as [fan:1] and [fan:2]