Asus GeForce RTX 2060 TUF 6GB is loud...

[Zelenia]

Hey,

 

I just did buy a new desktop 2 weeks ago... Well actually I did buy the parts and made store to build it for me because I'm terrible with screw drivers (I did install 2nd SSD myself but the store did the cable job for me). 

 

And here are some details:

 

BitFenix Prodigy Matx case (inverted cooling?):

Epic MS paint picture

 

Part list:

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HmNc4n

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor  
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 33.84 CFM CPU Cooler 
Motherboard: MSI B450M MORTAR MAX Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard 
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory 
Storage: Kingston A400 240 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive, Western Digital Blue 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive 
Video Card: Asus GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB TUF OC Video Card  
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2018) 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Case Fan: Noctua NF-F12 PWM 54.97 CFM 120 mm Fan 

 

Performance is amazing compared to my previous PC but my issue is how loud this particular RTX 2060 is under load. It's somewhat tolerable below 60% fan speed but after that it starts to sound like a high voltage vacuum cleaner. It pierces through game music and headsets and even my husband who is sitting 2m from me notices it...

 

I mainly play casually Overwatch/Final Fantasy XIV and some older games so I don't necessarily need the top-notch performance all the time (I just like little eye-candy sometimes). I did try to limit FPS for Overwatch (from 154 -> 100) and it did help for about 1,5 hours. After that GPU fans kept spinning at 65-70% even though temp was around 71°. 

 

I'm not really sure what is the best thing to do here. More case fans for better airflow? Get other GPU? Adjust fan speed profile with MSI Afterburner? 

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

 

[Zelenia]

Little update.  8 days later, yes, the GPU noise still bothers me quite a lot because my ears are just sensitive... 

 

I did edit my first post and hope it makes more sense now... Yeah I know I'm whining a little. In idle the sound levels are pleasant even. 

 

Just btw, I had no idea I actually had bought GPU with factory overclock. It just proves how new I'm to this thing. Hehe.

 

 

 

 

[Whiro]

On 1/7/2020 at 7:04 PM, Zelenia said:

Epic MS paint picture

You sure gpu is making that noise? Looking at your drawing (amazing work btw ) your fans are connected to the psu not mobo  
If you sure it’s a gpu than try to lower fan speed maybe

[Zelenia]

15 minutes ago, Whiro said:

You sure gpu is making that noise? Looking at your drawing (amazing work btw ) your fans are connected to the psu not mobo  
If you sure it’s a gpu than try to lower fan speed maybe

Yeah, the wires are drawn poorly here. I should've taken a photo instead.  They are there just mainly to "demonstrate" that they are clumped together here. Fans are spinning properly so I assume they are connected all right. 

 

Hmm well I'm not really 100% sure. No idea how I'd test that. This Ryzen 5 3600 processor was indeed quite pain in the butt at start because it was accelerating all the time. Even when I did move a mouse it had to make some noise so I know it's working hard.  I did change power setting to "balanced" so it did stop doing that. 

[Zelenia]

Yes, it's the GPU making the noise. I guess it's just that type of GPU that has "high pitch" that is unpleasant. It gets fairly hot too compared to other RTX 2060 around.  I should've checked this before purchase and just get silent GTX 1660ti instead.  Well you can't get good things for cheap.

 

//edit. I'm not actually sure if fans are connected to mobo or not. But they should be running 100% all the time if they weren't, no? 

 

//edit 2. Tbh I don't know anymore. It's probably both GPU and CPU that add to the noise and the case isn't helping. I'll need to look into it later when I get more money. 

[Zelenia]

I finally did figure this out in case someone else has same issue with this particular GPU. 

 

I did try to install drivers again, went through BIOS maybe 100 times, replaced case fans with expensive ones and flipped them around, moved cables around for better airflow etc. Yeah the case has better cooling now but it didn't help this GPU much.

 

This did the trick however.

 

 

 

 

Someone might ask, why though? I'm not sure why but GPU was overclocking itself to 1935Mhz (GPU boost 3.0?) when playing any game. This was making GPU to run quite hot and fans spinning like 70-80%. That together with terrible case fans didn't mix well. 

 

Now the GPU clocks around 1400Mhz and stays around 70-75°C under load, the fan speed never goes above 50%. I still can play my games (relatively old ones) in 60-100FPS at 1080p and it's silent. 

 

And yeah, I'll let the GPU release it's fury when it needs to.

[Barakas]

Signed up to specifically say thanks for this.  Had exactly the same issue, fans so noisy while playing older games that it would cut through sound on headphones and was starting to give me a headache.

 

Couldn't find any solution anywhere else after a lot of time searching, but wound the settings back as you suggested and it's now almost silent.  Thanks for saving my sanity!

[saifulpayid]

i'm having same problem here too...

[Wh0_Am_1]

Welcome to the LTT forums those who are new! At this stage in the game, I would have to say that the best option is simply to mess with the fan profile, as the hardware is already owned, and unless airflow is restricted, a new fan will likely not help all that much. What can be done is you can create a new fan profile that will limit the speed of the fan, and then turn the profile to auto when more performance is needed.

[Sxies]

@Zelenia I signed-up just to say: thank you so much for these settings! I got the same GPU ( the non-OC version which does the same exact thing XD, and it stays at 1890 MHz ) but with these settings now everything is more quiet. 1 question, should I also modify the power limit to 78%? I only play Rainbow Six Siege and it works pretty good for me as for now, but I haven't changed that option yet.

[Zelenia]

21 hours ago, Sxies said:

@Zelenia I signed-up just to say: thank you so much for these settings! I got the same GPU ( the non-OC version which does the same exact thing XD, and it stays at 1890 MHz ) but with these settings now everything is more quiet. 1 question, should I also modify the power limit to 78%? I only play Rainbow Six Siege and it works pretty good for me as for now, but I haven't changed that option yet.

Welcome to the LTT forums! I'm glad more people are still finding this old topic useful.  As long as your temperatures are fine and noise levels are under control you don't really need to touch power limit in MSI Afterburner. I wouldn't do that in FPS games anyway since you definitely don't want any performance loss (stutter) v.s other players. I did end up undervolting my card to match the "advertised" clock speed to keep it even more cooler and more silent.  

 

Irony here is that Asus did add "silent mode" button in their next line of TUF cards (and better heatsink). I guess lots of people complained about the noise. 

[Sxies]

19 hours ago, Zelenia said:

Welcome to the LTT forums! I'm glad more people are still finding this old topic useful.  As long as your temperatures are fine and noise levels are under control you don't really need to touch power limit in MSI Afterburner. I wouldn't do that in FPS games anyway since you definitely don't want any performance loss (stutter) v.s other players. I did end up undervolting my card to match the "advertised" clock speed to keep it even more cooler and more silent.  

 

Irony here is that Asus did add "silent mode" button in their next line of TUF cards (and better heatsink). I guess lots of people complained about the noise. 

I've actually switched back to the default fan profile also known as auto (disabled the fan curve) and just left the core clock at -502 mhz & and the rest of the settings to their default values as well and now my temps are even better ( -2 / -3 degrees celsius ) + I don't know why but for some reason the default fan profile isn't loud anymore...hmm. And by looking at your fan curve at around 65 degrees it stays at 40% while mine is 45% at 65 degrees as well so it's a small difference anyway. As long as it's under 50% it should be really quiet. ( I do also care about temps since it could increase the lifespan  )

[Sxies]

@Zelenia Also 1 more question. My Memory Clock stays at 7000 MHz when playing any game, is it good? Should I also underclock this one or it's running at a good value? Is yours doing the same? I heard that underclocking the Memory might affect some games.
As far as I know Memory Clock is the speed of the VRAM while GPU Clock stands for the speed of the GPU's processor.

[Tegneren]

28 minutes ago, Sxies said:

@Zelenia Also 1 more question. My Memory Clock stays at 7000 MHz when playing any game, is it good? Should I also underclock this one or it's running at a good value? Is yours doing the same? I heard that underclocking the Memory might affect some games.
As far as I know Memory Clock is the speed of the VRAM while GPU Clock stands for the speed of the GPU's processor.

I know it wasn't me you asked, but memory clock og 7000MHz is what a 2060 is supposed to run at. DDR in "GDDR memory" stands for Double Data Rate, so when you multiply the reported speed by two you get the effective memory speed from the listed spec for the card.

[Sxies]

41 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

I know it wasn't me you asked, but memory clock og 7000MHz is what a 2060 is supposed to run at. DDR in "GDDR memory" stands for Double Data Rate, so when you multiply the reported speed by two you get the effective memory speed from the listed spec for the card.

So I should leave it like that? 
Here are my GPU Specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/asus-tuf-rtx-2060-gaming.b6680
 

[Tegneren]

3 minutes ago, Sxies said:

So I should leave it like that? 
Here are my GPU Specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/asus-tuf-rtx-2060-gaming.b6680
 

Techpowerup didnt list the memory speed specifically, but it should be 14000MHz. https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Graphics-Cards/All-series/TUF-RTX2060-6G-GAMING/techspec/

 

I haven't heard anything about getting any benefit by underclocking memory on these cards, in most cases its the other way.

I dont think it would give you anything other than maybe less heat output. Maybe if it was factory overclocked you could get more stability by reducing it to stock speed.

[Sxies]

24 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

Techpowerup didnt list the memory speed specifically, but it should be 14000MHz. https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Graphics-Cards/All-series/TUF-RTX2060-6G-GAMING/techspec/

 

I haven't heard anything about getting any benefit by underclocking memory on these cards, in most cases its the other way.

I dont think it would give you anything other than maybe less heat output. Maybe if it was factory overclocked you could get more stability by reducing it to stock speed.

So it goes all the way up to 14000 MHz
I'll just stick with these settings then, although I reduced the Core Clock speed by 502 MHz (max), it's still trying to go over 1410, but it can't and that's what I want + the default fan profile isn't loud anymore, the fan levels were reduced by around 5-7%, and it doesn't go over 67-68 degrees celsius as it used to. Even in older games such as minecraft it would constantly run at 1935 MHz (no OC) but everything's good for now.  

[Tegneren]

7 minutes ago, Sxies said:

So it goes all the way up to 14000 MHz
I'll just stick with these settings then, although I reduced the Core Clock speed by 502 MHz (max), it's still trying to go over 1410, but it can't and that's what I want + the default fan profile isn't loud anymore, the fan levels were reduced by around 5-7%, and it doesn't go over 67-68 degrees celsius as it used to. Even in older games such as minecraft it would constantly run at 1935 MHz (no OC) but everything's good for now.  

 

Yeah, that's the speed it will run at as long as it is under load.

 

I dont really understand why you would choke of the card that much. You could in stead just reduce the temperature limit and adjust the fan curves and then let it boost as it will. But thats up to you.

Regarding it boosting to 1900+ MHz, as long as it has temprature and power headroom it will boost as far as it can (if left alone). The boost clock in the specs are just a target and minimum expected boost.

[Sxies]

4 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

Yeah, that's the speed it will run at as long as it is under load.

 

I dont really understand why you would choke of the card that much. You could in stead just reduce the temperature limit and adjust the fan curves and then let it boost as it will. But thats up to you.

Regarding it boosting to 1900+ MHz, as long as it has temprature and power headroom it will boost as far as it can (if left alone). The boost clock in the specs are just a target and minimum expected boost.

Yeah but that would've been max. 77 degrees, and this card most likely can easily reach those temps if I'm going to play a new game for example and it would result in a system shutdown I guess? I don't know. I tried using the fan curve but as for now the difference is really small between it and the default fan profile because it doesn't reach that high temperature anymore. I haven't noticed a change in FPS yet.

[Tegneren]

1 hour ago, Sxies said:

Yeah but that would've been max. 77 degrees, and this card most likely can easily reach those temps if I'm going to play a new game for example and it would result in a system shutdown I guess? I don't know. I tried using the fan curve but as for now the difference is really small between it and the default fan profile because it doesn't reach that high temperature anymore. I haven't noticed a change in FPS yet.

If you "unlink" the temperature from the power limit you can take it lower.

It doesn't shut down at the temp. limit you set in afterburner, it just starts to throttle down to keep itself below that limit. It only shuts down if the temperature reaches somewhere between 95°C-105°C, where it can be damaging to the card

[Sxies]

12 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

If you "unlink" the temperature from the power limit you can take it lower.

It doesn't shut down at the temp. limit you set in afterburner, it just starts to throttle down to keep itself below that limit. It only shuts down if the temperature reaches somewhere between 95°C-105°C, where it can be damaging to the card

So is there an alternative of getting less heat and lower temps without actually messing with the performance? (Like what I did above with the gpu core clock).
Some friend told me that he'd rather go with a 1050 @ default settings instead of buying a 2060 and underclocking it xd.

[Tegneren]

Your friend is mostly correct, its basically wasted money to underclock a card to that degree, although you get more VRAM on a 2060 vs a 1050.

 

If you dont worry about loosing the warranty and such, you could try replacing the termal paste and pads on the card. If you do, make sure you have new pads available before opening it up as the existing one might get damaged in the process. This is from my own experience, I had to wait for a week for new pads to arrive.

 

Other than that there is always watercooling , but I wouldn't do that on a card in that price range, a new card with better cooling solution might be cheaper.

 

But I still think the temp limit and fan curve adjustment is your best bet.

[Sxies]

21 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

Your friend is mostly correct, its basically wasted money to underclock a card to that degree, although you get more VRAM on a 2060 vs a 1050.

 

If you dont worry about loosing the warranty and such, you could try replacing the termal paste and pads on the card. If you do, make sure you have new pads available before opening it up as the existing one might get damaged in the process. This is from my own experience, I had to wait for a week for new pads to arrive.

 

Other than that there is always watercooling , but I wouldn't do that on a card in that price range, a new card with better cooling solution might be cheaper.

 

But I still think the temp limit and fan curve adjustment is your best bet.

So the higher it is (temp limit), your GPU will be able to use more of its resources, and vice-versa?
Where should I limit this at? 75 degrees would be fine? Should I also modify the power limit, will it decrease the performance?
Thank you once again for helping me with this & @Zelenia too!
This is my first ever desktop as I came here after switching from a laptop.

[Tegneren]

46 minutes ago, Sxies said:

So the higher it is (temp limit), your GPU will be able to use more of its resources, and vice-versa?
Where should I limit this at? 75 degrees would be fine? Should I also modify the power limit, will it decrease the performance?
Thank you once again for helping me with this & @Zelenia too!
This is my first ever desktop as I came here after switching from a laptop.

Yes basically.

How it works is that the gpu boosting goes in intervals based on temperature, meaning if the temperature is lets say between 55 and 60C (random numbers) the gpu will boost to a certain maximum clock speed as long as it has enough power headroom. The maximum clock speed decreases a little bit if the temperature reaches the next level (60-65 in this example). This is independent from the temp limit. So the gpu will clock itself down bit by bit the higher the temperature reaches, regardless of what you do, until it reaches the limit either by power consumption or by temperature. It will then throttle down enough to stay under that limit.

So when you decrease the temp limit, you just set it to throttle down earlier, it can still theoretically boost to 1950MHz or so when the temp is low.

 

 

[Sxies]

10 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

Yes basically.

How it works is that the gpu boosting goes in intervals based on temperature, meaning if the temperature is lets say between 55 and 60C (random numbers) the gpu will boost to a certain maximum clock speed as long as it has enough power headroom. The maximum clock speed decreases a little bit if the temperature reaches the next level (60-65 in this example). This is independent from the temp limit. So the gpu will clock itself down bit by bit the higher the temperature reaches, regardless of what you do, until it reaches the limit either by power consumption or by temperature. It will then throttle down enough to stay under that limit.

So when you decrease the temp limit, you just set it to throttle down earlier, it can still theoretically boost to 1950MHz or so when the temp is low.

 

 

At the moment it's set to 83. I think I will try with 75 or 78. Should I also modify the power limit or it has nothing to do with it?