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Club3D HD6970 fans don't drop 24% and are noisy! (same cooler Powercolor 6950 PCS++)

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Hi guys, is something curious what is happening to me, but that together you are going to get help with what I get.

This monday I have received my two new Club 3D HD6970 dual fan version, specifically dealing with this model shares sink to the series Powercolor PCS in principle a guarantee.



Before installing the new card drivers uninstalled the 5800 series had and cleaned the register with the Driver Sweeper in Safe mode.

Well, install the two new cards, I put the CrossFire bridge and start the system, and them the appropriate drivers, in this case the later 11.1. Restart the computer and start making the typical sound of spinning fans have plenty of rpm and normally removed in the operating system starts to load, just a few seconds ... Well, the noise so loud that fan is not gone in no time and that makes me very odd, since it is a sink that as I read is the quietest in the market, particularly is this (the same as mounted the PowerColor PCS + + 6950).


The GPU-Z detects both cards perfectly:



Temperatures and the% turnover of their fans are right, nothing unusual:



In this review of driverheaven.com they analyze the Powercolor HD6950 PCS++ and say it:

"Temperatures on the PowerColor Are lower at load and idle, as power is used. For Noise Levels, this is Impressive Another aspect of this card. It is the quietest 6950 We Have Used So Far."

So I wonder ... Would it have to update the BIOS or at least edit the profiles of the fans in it to make it look like the model Powercolor?, if so, what software should be used to do, how could he know or put values where I can get the values of the profiles of model fans PowerColor PCS + +?

IDLE

GPU1



GPU2



...and even these values are very noisy ... Am I missing something? :confused:


Fans at 100% with the MSi Afterburner, curious results by GPU-Z, the fans are al full speed or only at the % that this screens shows?:

GPU1



GPU2




With the fans al 100% by Afterburner, the AIDA64 tells me that:




And one last thing ... can go wrong all these monitoring programs at the same time?

Even at this time this capture shows all fans speed is 0%, but it's untruth, I estimate that at least about 800-1000 rpm at this moment:






Can anybody help me please???
 
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Simple question:
How many wires go to fans on this card. If there are four of them, you should have PWM. If 2 or 3 then your card will never be quiet on this cooling.
 
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Simple question:
How many wires go to fans on this card. If there are four of them, you should have PWM. If 2 or 3 then your card will never be quiet on this cooling.


I see, now I tell you ...

Thx!
 
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The cables has 4 wires!
 

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You can use MSI Afterburner and set a user-defined fan curve.
 
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I think your old CCC profiles from a previous installation are interfering.

Do how you normally uninstall your drivers. This time, go into your appdata folder (you will need to enable hidden folders through the CP) and delete your ATi folders in both the local and roaming folders. Then install your new drivers.

Hope this is the fixes it for you. :toast:
 

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I'm playing with my new PCS++ 6950 fan settings - trying to kill the noise entirely.

It defaults to 20% which is reasonably quiet. When Afterburner loads and applies it's own profile... it then switches down to the profile I set (which is basically 0 then 30 then 100). 30% is enough to keep the card turning over in games that I've tested so far.

The problem is that even at 0% it's the loudest pair of fan in the PC. However my PSU runs passive at idle, and my case fans are already very low noise (Fractal Design ones) and run at 40%.

The reason I'm here is to read up and learn how to use the BIOS editor to see if I can edit the BIOS and turn the fans down as low as possible.

However I have noticed that the fans are only connected by a 3 pin cable - so now pulse width modulation, meaning it's all done by voltage, which means they may not be able to be slowed down enough. I'm pretty sure the cards in the original post have only 3 wires as well.
 

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I've uploaded it. Calm down! :)

I also have tried flashing the fans slower. They won't go under 24% duty cycle, however they will do that if I get Afterburner to do it. 0% isn't 0% though, it's still a reasonable amount of speed.

I suspect I'd need to plug into a different fan header altogether in order to tune performance any more.
 

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not sure what driverheaven tested when they say its so quiet, on my sample i saw 15% fan speed levels in idle and the card was noisy indeed

the fan motors have a minimum rpm speed, even if you set the fan speed lower it will not change the fan speed
 
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On PCB you can see only 2 pins. So there is no real fan speed monitoring and no fan control possibility.
 

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On PCB you can see only 2 pins. So there is no real fan speed monitoring and no fan control possibility.

you can control a 2 pin fan using a pwm signal on the fan voltage, which is what all graphics cards do. you don't get rpm readings though
 

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Without opening mine up I can't check to see how many connectors are really there. I'm sure I counted 3 wires on the Powercolor.

I also thought that 3 or 2 pin fans were not PWM, but just had variable voltage. PWM has an advantage over this because it can spin up at a lower RPM.

My PCS++ fan is slower/quieter at 0% than it is at 20%. From that I'm concluding that instead of it really being 0% to 100%, it is instead minimum+0% to minimum+100%.

I can confirm though that there's no RPM sensing.

Perhaps the Powercolor PCS++ and the Club 3D are not as identical as far as coolers are concerned as first thought?
 

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uploaded it where mate? lol why did OP get banned?

I uploaded it to here - although it's not in the database yet. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, or if it just takes a few days.

Not sure why the OP is banned, but he's back with a new account so I guess it's ok :)
 
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Now, I'm not banned.

It was a mistake, they think I'm spam, but now all it's ok.
 

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All's well that ends well :)
 

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Going back to the point on this thread.....

It would appear that there is simply nothing that can be done to quieten these cards any further. The most I've been able to do is bring the fan speed down to 0% (which as I've said isn't 0%), beyond that they perhaps would be quieter, but since they're not PWM they'd simply stop spinning.

A shame really!
 

Raistlin

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So how loud is it at 0%? What percentage is sufficient for gaming?
 

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It isn't absolutely silent - Wizzard might be a good person to ask, he's just done a review of them. Perhaps he'd add to the review how quiet they were at idle at 0% - it's enough to keep them at 33 degrees in my PC. I've been doing stuff in 2D all day today (so little or no drain on the GPU) and afterburner shows it has sat between 33 and 35.

I have a very quiet PC though, if I open my window then the noise of traffic from 1/4 of a mile away and other noise etc is louder than the fans. Noise is very subjective though and hard to describe. I can hear the fans in the dead of night if there's no other noise.

When I set up a profile and I play a game - Civ 5 for example - where it's under load the whole time it tops out at around 70 degrees. It's very quiet for gaming, I have it running at about 35%.
 

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Well... I spoke to M2MDirect and they were super kind enough to allow me to return the second non-faulty card. Even at 0% I found it just too loud.

I've now ordered a 580 Direct CU, and that had better be as quiet as the reviews say.

All of this comes down to the two reviews I based things on - the HardwareHeaven and the Hexus review. Both of these reviews gave entirely false information on the fan noise and failed to pick up on the "improved" cooler actually being considerably worse than stock. Add to that the other review I read was Wizzard's and I'm sorry to say that he also dropped the ball, he said that the fan profile was at fault, and in his summary "A PowerColor specific issue are the noise levels of the card, which do not seem to be optimized to the capabilities of the thermal solution. In idle the card is quite noisy. With 3D load added, fan speed barely changes - a clear sign that someone didn't choose the right settings for the BIOS." Sadly it's got nothing at all to do with BIOS settings. It's simply because the cooler is not PWM. Fans need to be high power, and they also need to PWM to be quiet at very low speeds. Edit : The fans on the PCS++ cooler have either 2 or 3 pins, I'm not 100% sure which... 2 or 3 pins allows changing voltage, 3 pins allows reporting of the RPM of the fans. 4 pins allows pulse width modulation which is (at least in my opinion) a basic need on modern graphics cards.

All is well that ends well... I really can't praise M2M enough. They're being really good about taking the cards back.

Edit : Just to be sure this comes across with the right tone... I'm quite wary of being too harsh to Wizzard.

The Hexus review and the Hardware Heaven review flat out lied. Either they didn't test the card properly, or they deliberately misled because the review was in some way paid for. I now carry an opinion (rightly or wrongly) that Hexus reviews are prone to being inept, and that Hardware Heaven reviews are paid for advertisments.

As for the Tech Power Up review - it got absolutely everything correct, including picking up on the nasty idle noise. However Wizzard's suggestion as to what was causing the problem was off the mark. As a result I believed the fan solution to be a good solution (after all why would they replace the stock with one that was worse?) and that it just needed some BIOS tuning or Afterburner work. If the Hexus and Hardware Heaven reviews hadn't been so completely wrong then the Tech Power Up review would have set alarm bells ringing. I'm not in any way shape or form bashing Wizzard's reviews - I find them meticulous, insightful and easy to read.
 
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davetheshrew

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after all why would they replace the stock with one that was worse

because its cheaper for them, I would have spent an extra couple of quid to be honest and got a thermalright shaman or spitfire and a vrm rev 5, thats what I did anyway, the best :)
 
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