GPU fan going crazy

Otus456 · June 12, 2020

Hey guys,

the fans on my Asus Strix 1070 started acting weirdly, seemingly out of the blue. They seem to be running at full tilt whenever they are running at all. They do however turn off according to the fan curve when they are supposed to. Setting them to different speeds in open hardware monitor results in them staying inaudible at 15% or below and going full starting helicopter after a few seconds at anything above that. The reported fan speed also seem unrealistically low, something around at 800 RPM with the fans clearly going at or near max speed. In gaming once the card reaches temps I set the fan curve to start ramping up the fans (usually 60°C) it immediately goes ham.
I assume this could mean the card adjusts fan speed according to the incorrect RPM and keeps ramping up because they are reported lower than they actually are?

Neither windows, nor MSI Afterburner, nor SpeedFan nor the GPU driver had been updated 48h prior to the weird behaviour.

The card had been running at a mild overclock with a fairly aggressive fan curve completely stable for years and i have good airflow in the case so it was hardly over low 70°Cs under load. I have tested everything with stock settings and the default fan curve as well with no change in behaviour.

I did update anything i could think of since, including the GPU BIOS the most current one still being pretty old. I also replaced the thermal paste because I was running out of ideas at that point. Slightly better idle temps (38°- low 40°s when browsing) but no change in fan behaviour. The connectors on the fan etc all at least look fine, not that that proves anything.

Now assuming the PWM is shot, would replacing the cooler matter or is that component on the card's pcb? Would replacing just the fans themselves change anything? Because that would be considerably cheaper.

Hope anyone has ideas, wasnt planning on investing in NC-Headphones yet.

Other components:
i5 4570

Gigabyte H87-HD3

Win 10 Build 18363

16GB Crucial RAM

Corsair RM650i