No, it's definately not dust build up that's causing this since the fan is clean and it does ramp up in speed during gaming.
Well, I just found out that the fan switching only occurs when the ATI catalyst driver is in use on both Windows and Linux but not on FreeBSD which uses the opensource radeonhd driver. On FreeBSD the fan spins non-stop at a much higher and constant speed.
I am worried that this constant switching on/off might cause the fan to fail prematurely.
I am using the latest catalyst 9.3 driver.
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