I bought an interesting blower-style 3080ti off of ebay, one that was allegedly pulled from a defunct cloud gaming centre. The card works and performs well, but the fan won’t spin slower than 50% speed, as measured by nvidia-smi (which is quite fast and loud on this blower style card). I was playing around a bit and I turned off Xorg and gdm, and the fan went very quiet! Strangely, if I run nvidia-smi while in this state, the fan spikes back to 50% before slowly returning to it’s quieter idle speed. So it seems like whenever the driver is interacting with the card in any capacity whatsoever, the fan won’t go below 50%, even if the card isn’t actually doing anything.
This box has a 1080ti along side the 3080ti, and it is the 1080ti that has display outputs connected and has Xorg running on it, so the 3080ti really was doing nothing…
I’m on Rocky Linux 9 with the latest nvidia driver installed, but just to see if it was a Linux-specific thing, I booted into windows and the fan speed wouldn’t go below 50% there either.
Does anybody have any insight into what might be causing this behaviour? I can live with loud fans when I’m actually running something, but when idle, it’s quite annoying. Could a vbios modification be useful here?
Since I need these cards for compute rather than actual graphics, I could work off of a VM and pass through a weak third GPU just to render my desktop… But it would be nice to be able to run the GUI directly on the host.