GPU Temperatures

Hi all,

Finally managed to get in some decent gaming sessions on my new PC over the weekend (spec below in my sig). Handles Borderlands 2 (admittedly not a particular recent game) pretty much flawlessly, easily running at 144 fps most of the time.

My daughter was playing Fortnite for a while yesterday, and afterwards I noticed an alert from some monitoring software I've installed, saying that the GPU temperature went above the (default) alarm level of 80 degrees. Should I be concerned about this?

I've since enabled an overlay in the monitoring software, and when playing Borderlands 2 it seemed to hover around the 65 to 70 degree mark. The fans on the GPU don't seem to be anywhere near as noisy as my previous system (that had a GTX 970 in it).

Do I need to consider some extra cooling in there? The CPU cooler was uprated when the system was built, but other than that I just have the standard fans that came with the case.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Andy

While 80 degrees isn't at all dangerous for the GPU, it's warmer than I'd expect for most 1060s and could be affecting performance by seeing the card dial down boost clocks a bit.

What model of GTX 1060 is it exactly? You can use GPU-Z's Lookup feature to see. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

The fan noise isn't necessarily comparable especially if the coolers are a different design.

It's unlikely you need extra cooling. It could be that you'll end up tweaking the GPU's fan profile to favour cooling over acoustics more.

GPU-z reports this as the GPU in use:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-1060-6-gb-rev-2.c3063

Any advice regarding fan profile tweaking would be appreciated. This isn't something I've any experience of.

Thanks

Andy

Is that what the card looks like? i.e. it has a single circular 'squirrel cage' fan similar to the photo.

In which case the blower fans aren't amazing (they're fine, just not as good as dual fan coolers are), and the fan profile is often a bit conservative.

You can use MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X to set custom curves. These work with any brand of GPU, not just MSI or EVGA. And they're free.

Setting the fan curve is pretty easy, there's a menu/button that opens the fan curve tool in the software. This looks like a graph with temps on one axis and fan % on the other. You can adjust that so the fan speed % is higher for given temps. This will make the card louder under heavy gaming loads, but keep temps down and help keep boost clocks up.

Precision X: https://youtu.be/SKWbKCKsWVQ?t=377
(that's an overclocking tutorial, so ignore everything except the bit about fan curve)

MSI Afterburner: https://youtu.be/Nf9_DTKpPkY?t=64

Note that blower fans can't go to 0 rpm, they are always on, unlike some models where the fans switch off entirely under low load.

If you want to get a sense of before & after, you could download a benchmark like Ungine Valley or Firestrike, run that, monitor temps, fan speeds, and boost clocks for the GPU (Precision X and Afterburner both can do on-screen overlays of that). Then adjust the fan profile, and do the same. Ideally temps will be down a bit, and frequencies and performance may be up a bit.

Oussebon said:

Is that what the card looks like? i.e. it has a single circular 'squirrel cage' fan similar to the photo.

Click to expand...

Not sure, I just clicked on the link in the software and posted the URL.

I'll have a look when I get home tonight.

Thanks for the advice regarding adjusting fan curves, I might fire Fortnite up tonight and have a play. What sort of temperature should I be aiming for?

Thanks

Andy