OpenBSD & nVIdia: Fan settings

[spitfire_ak]

Hello,

I've recently installed OpenBSD 5.5 and have been enjoying the experience; it's been a long, long time since I've enjoyed the computing experience!

I have an Asrock MB with an AMD A10-6800k processor, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD and a Blu Ray Writer; my video card is, however, what has been giving me problems:

Asus GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini Graphics Card

While I can do without 3d effects and am happy with OpenBSD performance, my graphics card's fans sound like a jet engine. Is there any way to control the graphics card's fan speed in OpenBSD? The nvidia drivers control it in Windows, Linux & even PC-BSD.

Thank you in advance.

[ocicat]

Welcome!

Originally Posted by spitfire_ak

The nvidia drivers control it in Windows, Linux & even PC-BSD.

...& as I understand, this comes from a closed binary driver which nVidia makes available, but no accompanying source.

The OpenBSD project refuses, due to its philosophy, to include or encorporate unknown blobs which cannot be studied & corrected. Given that the drivers from these other projects are not compatible, you have two choices:

• Determine if running the VESA driver, vesa(4), provides an alternative.
• Stay away from nVidia graphics hardware when it comes to OpenBSD.

While this may be unacceptable, this is the reality of the project, the developers know it, & the situation is not likely to change in the near future.

[spitfire_ak]

Thank you for such a quick response.

Is the graphics card question something which should be asked of OpenBSD or xorg? I am not sure of the protocol here; I am running the vesa driver and cannot find anything to tune the video card as concerns the fan.

Even in the CLI environment, the graphics cards becomes loud. I have found some interesting stuff for improving vesa performance with nvidia cars.

[spitfire_ak]

Wow! What a different experience with an AMD-based video card; I have a Gigabyte Brix with an AMD chipset and OpenBSD configured the card perfectly! Even the CLI looks loads better than in openSUSE/Linux...

I may buy a nice AMD-based GPU for the other system, now, no hassles at all. The reason I purchased the nvidia GTX 670 is because it has some nice computing power, does anybody have any personal experience with an AMD graphics card that performs as well or better? The card has to be a mini card to fit in my case.

[jggimi]

If you're looking for general "power" rankings among video cards, you may want to review the lists at www.videocardbenchmark.net, which may help you pick something relatively equivalent to the card you have.

---

While I would never pick an Nvidia card for use with OpenBSD, I just bought one for my daughter, who is beginning art school at the end of this month. She requires a video card capable of computing 3D ray tracing functions within Adobe After Effects, so I acquired a workstation built around one of the few video cards that were both on Adobe's certification list and available.

[spitfire_ak]

Although I am a HUGE AMD fan, I find that nvidia cards are, bang-per-buck, more powerful; and, I'm not talking gaming, which I don't really care to do.

I was looking on that list, thank you by the way, and hopefully found a couple that can replace this card; I have a mini-itx system and the GTX 670 is an extremely powerful mini card that fits in limited spaces.