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Old 21st March 2009
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ephemera ephemera is offline
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Default ati hd3650 fan spin up/down

Hi,

I have an Sapphire radeon hd3650 (512mb/ddr2) graphics card.
The fan spins up for a second and stops for a second or two and then spins up for a second... and this cycle keeps repeating.
The temp. appears normal (haven't seen it go above 59c during gaming, normally it average around 53c but constantly fluctuates b/w ~50c and ~57c). But during gaming the fan does spin continously.

Is the card/fan faulty or is this switching on/off of the fan speed normal?
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Old 21st March 2009
ddekok ddekok is offline
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Perhaps the fan is dusty? I know that with my nVidia 6800GT, dust built up in the heatsink and fan. I cleaned it out thoroughly (don't forget to remove the cover off the heat sink and clean in there too). I had a massive temperature drop after that.

Other than that, all I can think of is a threshold value in the driver settings.
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Old 21st March 2009
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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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Old 13th April 2009
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Since the cats from late last year came out, you can manually set the fan speed via the control center on Windows even without 3rd party tools like speedfan if you don't like auto throttling. Sapphire video cards have always obnoxious throttling patterns though IMO.
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Old 14th April 2009
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Sorry I forgot to post here - I solved the problem by reflashing the firmware using RBE.
After reading the docs and experimenting with different options I finally got it right. Many thanks to the fellow who created RBE - excellent program - and no thanks to Sapphire for programming a brain dead fan control alg.
As it turns out the card was totally fine except for the fan issue.

For anyone interested, these are the values I am using currently:

Using Transfer function (DC = DCmin + (T - Tmin) * Tslope / 16):
Tmin = 40 C
Tmax = 106 C (Tslope = 21%)
DCmin = 15%
Hysteresis = 24%
Tmin hysteresis = 4 C
Spin up cycle = 20%
Spin up interval = 7
PWM ramp enabled = 2%
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