My rx 480 fans are blowing at full speed for no reason

[RobyGon]

Hi guys, since yesterday i have a strange problem with my gpu fans. While i was gaming, my rx 480 fans started pumping at max speed for extended periods of time. I checked gpu temps and they never went above 68 ° C. The fans spun even after closing the game, with my gpu hovering around 40°C. Only after like 2 minutes they went quiet again. What's worse is that now my fans start spinning at max speed as soon as i boot the pc and they don't stop. I hope that my fan controller didn't blow up or something.

 

Of course, i have no kind of overclocking going on, both my cpu and gpu are at stock speeds. The problem was there both with manual fan control from radeon app and default settings applied. Also another thing to note is that right now Radeon app doesn't show my gpu fans rpm. It says that they are stuck at 0 rpm which is of course not true at all since they are going at full speed. I don't use msi afterburner, the only external monitoring programm that i have is hwmonitor, which i unistalled to see if it was affecting something. A thing to note is that hwmonitor didn't show my gpu fan speed (something that always did normally) which adds to the Radeon app showing me the 0 rpm thing.

 

My specs:

MSI H97 Gaming 3 Motherboard

I5 4590 (stock fan)

Sapphire rx 480

Evga 600w white

Crucial 500gb ssd

Seagate 1tb hdd

Windows 10 64-bit Operating System

 

 

P.S. I shut down my pc and waited like 5 minutes, booted up, fans started blowing again but when i arrived on windows screen, they went quiet. I'm not trying to boot any game because i don't want to fuck up everything again, i need my pc for studying exams.

 

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, RobyGon said:

snip

What version of Radeon Software are you using?

 

Also, are you on a reference card or a Nitro(+) or Pulse(+)?

[RobyGon]

20 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

What version of Radeon Software are you using?

 

Also, are you on a reference card or a Nitro(+) or Pulse(+)?

When the problem started i was on the latest drivers, the 20.11.2 one. When i unistalled drivers and reinstalled i went back to the last recommended one (according to Amd page), the 20.9.1.

 

My card is a Sapphire rx 480 Nitro+ 4GB. To add on my previous post i also tried running the gpu in "quiet" mode using the BIOS switch on the card itself but it had no effect.

 

Thanks a lot for answering me

 

Edit: When the card went back to "normal" (i.e. fans not spinning continuosly while gpu was in idle), my fans were ramping up at max at occasionally, while i was browsing internet and doing stuff with no gpu load whatsoever

Edited November 28, 2020 by RobyGon
added info

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, RobyGon said:

When the problem started i was on the latest drivers, the 20.11.2 one. When i unistalled drivers and reinstalled i went back to the last recommended one (according to Amd page), the 20.9.1.

 

My card is a Sapphire rx 480 Nitro+ 4GB. To add on my previous post i also tried running the gpu in "quiet" mode using the BIOS switch on the card itself but it had no effect.

 

Thanks a lot for answering me

I'd recommend you try playing a few games and report back how it performs so we can better help identify the issue.

 

Worst case scenario you can take out your RX 480 and use the built in iGPU to run Windows to study for your exams in case this all doesn't work.

[FakeFBI]

i think its a driver or bios prblem, esppecially with a i5 4th gen, they a bit weak i may say, if u can try putting in a different cpu, like a 4th gen i7, if not, check drivers and bios

[RobyGon]

37 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I'd recommend you try playing a few games and report back how it performs so we can better help identify the issue.

 

Worst case scenario you can take out your RX 480 and use the built in iGPU to run Windows to study for your exams in case this all doesn't work.

I tried and got more or less the same results: after a few minutes fans started going full speed while temps didn't go over 65°C. Sometimes they go quiet on their own and start blowing up again after a couple of minutes. Sometimes they don't shut up until i quit the game, even if temps go as low as 51 °C. As i've said in the post before (edited at the last minute), the gpu started doing this even while browsing chrome. It is a lot more rare and occasional but it happens.

 

Everything happens both with fans set to Automatic and Default on Radeon Software or with Manual settings enabled. It almost seems  like the card can only go from 0 straight up to 3000 rpm although, while i was testing some games with my computer case open, i saw the fans spinning normally in the first few minutes of playing up until everything goes to s**t again.

For the moment, i switched to my old R9 270x and the card is giving me no problem. Same 20.9.1 driver installed.

 

38 minutes ago, ComputerBuilder said:

i think its a driver or bios prblem, esppecially with a i5 4th gen, they a bit weak i may say, if u can try putting in a different cpu, like a 4th gen i7, if not, check drivers and bios

 

I doubt i'm having problems with my cpu. My i5 is 5 years old and my gpu is over 3 years old and they both worked fine until yesterday. I rolled back my gpu drivers to a previous version and nothing changed and the problem arises even on system boot up when technically drivers have no control on the piece of hardware so i'm more inclined to think that something on my gpu failed (and i hope it's not).  On the Bios side i don't know, my mobo is very old and i have the latest Bios update on it. I'm not ruling this out but i am skeptical.

 

[AlTech]

Just now, RobyGon said:

I tried and got more or less the same results: after a few minutes fans started going full speed while temps didn't go over 65°C. Sometimes they go quiet on their own and start blowing up again after a couple of minutes. Sometimes they don't shut up until i quit the game, even if temps go as low as 51 °C. As i've said in the post before (edited at the last minute), the gpu started doing this even while browsing chrome. It is a lot more rare and occasional but it happens.

 

Everything happens both with fans set to Automatic and Default on Radeon Software or with Manual settings enabled. It almost seems  like the card can only go from 0 straight up to 3000 rpm although, while i was testing some games with my computer case open, i saw the fans spinning normally in the first few minutes of playing up until everything goes to s**t again.

Have you tried re-applying thermal paste to your card?

 

Temperature sensors on GPUs can be sometimes inaccurate.

[FakeFBI]

17 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Have you tried re-applying thermal paste to your card?

 

Temperature sensors on GPUs can be sometimes inaccurate.

genius

[RobyGon]

On 11/28/2020 at 6:22 PM, AluminiumTech said:

Have you tried re-applying thermal paste to your card?

 

Temperature sensors on GPUs can be sometimes inaccurate.

Sorry about coming back to you so late. Yesterday i disassembled my gpu, cleaned up the dust (even if it wasn't that dusty) and reapplied the thermal compound which was very dry. I plugged the card back and, after a day of normal use and gaming, fans seem back to normal. The strange thing is that my temps aren't much different from before, maybe 1°C less under full load, they stayed pretty much the same and they are in line with the temps my card had since day 1 of use. Maybe you are right, the sensor is faulty. Could it be that my card had an excess of voltage because of a small power surge and plugging it out of the pc was enough to fix the problem? Random idea, maybe too farfetched.

 

Anyway things seems back to normal again, i'm thankfull for that.