Gigabyte 2080ti Windforce OC Fan noise - solved

[antus]

Just posting this here for others. I bought a Gigabyte 2080ti Windforce OC a couple of months ago, and found that it suffers from the widely reported fan noise of users of this card, to which there only seems to be a published partial soltution.

The noise is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sVX_UVKNSI

Ive found on other forums one proposed solution is to install the gigabyte aorus software, and toggle fans from semi-passive (where they switch off, which generates the start up noise) to active, where they supposedly run full time.

This does solve the noise in the video above, but when the card feels like it it will still pulse the fan speed up and down every couple of seconds which makes a different really distracting noise in an otherwise quite PC with nvme storage.

There are bios updates from gigabyte, but I installed those and found no difference. Ive also seen the aorus software crash and require termination from the task manager, and its also really ugly software with very limited capability compared to its competitors. For a simple looking app, it seems to be 220mb in size, and looking at the filesystem it includes every version of the microsoft runtimes in the app dir. It looks like the developers didnt know what they are doing and just unzipped a collection of DLLs in to the app and said "that seems to work". No faith in the dev team....

So after all this, and also seeing reports of bios cross flashing that increases the power limit and frequency limits to increase performance (this mod does that as well), I decided to risk my card and try the cross flash for my own sanity. I chose the galax 2080ti bios as it seemed to line up, has a high power rating, which the tripple fan windforce should be able to keep cool. The subsystem ID is different, but that can be overridden.

Im happy to report success! The fans no longer stop, and no longer behave in the same annoying way. The card is also faster. It now shows up as an unbranded nvidia 2080ti, and the Aorus software can no longer talk to it. Fine. Uninstall.
The tools I used are all over the internet but i'll put exactly what I used here. To install first backup your existing bios (or download it from https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/207 ... 264-181225 ).

Note that this could brick your card. Taking this risk is up to you. First confirmed that you have exactly a Gigabyte 2080ti Windforce OC card (there is a non-OC version, this is not compatible. There is also a Gaming OC version, and we are not talking about that card either). Then update, from an admin shell with:

Code: Select all

nvflash64 -6 Galax.2080TIGX126.rom

The -6 allows a the PCI subsystem ID mismatch to be ignored and it does change the PCI subsystem ID, which is why the gigabyte software can no longer see that its a gigabyte card. But regular drivers can still recognise it and work with it.

Then reboot your PC, and uninstall any Aorus software you have for your card too. Instead you can use MSI Afterburner, if you want.

The only issue I have seen so far is that MSI Afterburner show 0mv for the power level. I dont know why this is, and to me it does not matter.

[Gareth]

It's not being mechanically caused by the dust on the blades putting them out of balance is it?

Did they do it from the get go?

[antus]

Yeah they all, or most of them do it. My card was cheap second hand, probably because it was so annoying. I verified normal under load operation of the card, but didnt find the fan problem until after the sale was complete.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comment ... _gigabyte/
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/rtx-s ... em.423708/
http://forum.gigabyte.us/thread/6541/gi ... an-problem
http://forum.gigabyte.us/thread/5264/20 ... turn-click

There are many reports across the net, and there is also a store owner complaining that he bought a large number, and 50% of them have been returned, and the loss of time to him has been huge and eaten his profits and damaged his business rep.

[vlad01]

Quite a few makes of cards have weird issues with broken fan profiles and what not. Seems dumb having to mod the bios to fix factory design faults though, they should as Jensen would say "just work", ironic really given the price paid for that model lol

Lucky for me I haven't dealt with fans on my GPUs for years, I always go full open water loop and run a fanless radiator.

[antus]

Yeah, I thought that maybe they, and evga who are reporting the same thing, had chosen a fan controller IC that had something in hardware that was the cause, and thats why they couldnt fix it. Now it seems there is no hardware fault and they just dont know how to fix a basic software problem. Gigabyte have been on my s**t list for 15 years from prior experiences, but I decided that I should drop my grudge and try them again (and because I could get this card cheap) and straight away back to a world of problems. Gigabyte, no thanks.

[vlad01]

Agreed, had a few gigabyte products in the past, all failed, one board literally exploded. Haven't touched them in more than 15 years.

I tended to stick to Abit when they existed, now it's MSI and Asus. I got MSI board for my upgrade as they had one of the best line ups for x470, Asus dropped the ball that gen, but for x570 MSI fucked up and Asus were better that time. It changes so quick it's hard to keep up with who makes the best for a particular gen.
You just have to keep on top of the reviews and research.


EVGA was pretty good back in the day, haven't owned anything of theirs lately so I don't know where they stand atm.

My current card is a used EVGA GTX 980 classified, with full cover water block. Really over due for an upgrade as 4GB breaks some applications. I need at least 8GB now so looking at getting 5700XT with full cover block

[The1]

MSI Vote here, used to use Abit to back in the day! MSI make good mobo's to. Your prob in linux but in windows i use MSI Afterburner and setup my own custom fan profiles.

[vlad01]

I also use afterburner, it's a great program and riva tuner too