Radeon HD 6950 fan settings have no effect

[enteon]

Hello.

I have successfully unlocked the shaders on my PowerColor Radeon HD 6950 Dual Fan 2GB (dual bios) with RBE 1.28 and now want to reduce the idle fan speed.
I'm aware that this won't be possible as long as the AMD driver is running and I don't care about that, I care about the noise while running linux.

Now the values I set in RBE just don't change anything. Idle speed is still 24% (or at least similiarly loud).

Is this a bug in RBE or just a coincidence? Maybe the fans won't slow down if the GPU is still in its high power boot mode? Which might be the case for my non-windows test environment, GRUB2 and linux with just the open source radeon driver (which has bad to none powersaving capabilities).

As my card has a dual bios I would be willing to test beta versions of RBE.

Thank you

 

[thesmokingman]

Afaik the driver controls the fan speed.

 

[enteon]

The windows driver does, which is not present when not running windows. Which is why I have to rely on the built in fan controller. Which' settings I don't seem to be able to change (via RBE). Which I would like to change

Edit:
Seems the only software that can manipulate the fan speed withing useful limits ist MSI Afterburner. However, if you make your driver clock the card down (echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card1/device/power_method; echo low > /sys/class/drm/card1/device/power_profile) the card will lower the fan speed on its own. Although not as far as it could, it stays at about 40°C.

At that temperature the fan should be at 3%, according to RBE, but it sounds a lot faster. Therefore the question remains if RBE is buggy or if my non-reference design ist to blame.

I can live with the current noise level for now, but I'm always curious and helpful input would be much appreciated