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Have you noticed high fan RPMs after installing Quadro 4000 ?

brosenz

brosenz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 26, 2011
351
90
I have a Mac Pro 2009.

Just after I installed my new Nvidia Quadro 4000 for Mac I noticed that the fans are running at a much higher speed, everything else is working fine though, has anybody else noticed something like this ?. Just to clarify I am talking about the Mac Pro fans, not the one in the Video Card.

I am not using any other video card with the Quadro 4000. I've installed the Quadro 4000 on the PCI Slots #1 and #2 (both x16), just to try different locations but it's always the same issue.

I don't think the issue is temperature related, sometimes for no reason with the Mac Pro idle the computer fans will start ramping up speed up to very high RPMs, and sometimes with load on the computer the fans will run at very low RPMs, so I do not see a correlation between temperature and fan speed.

If I run Cinebench and execute an OpenGL test the Fans RPM will go down to the normal values and will stay there, this is really weird, it seems like the card needs to be activated or engaged by some OpenGL application and the fans (Expansion Slot and Power Supply) will return to their normal values.

I've been monitoring temperatures with iStat Menus, monstly CPU temperature and always in normal ranges, around 38C to 40C.

Any suggestion ?, thanks
 
PCI slot fan speed is controlled by slot power consumption. The Quadro is a power hungry card to obviously it will trigger the SMU to increase fan speed in response.
 
i have a similar issue, but i thought it was the Quadro 4000's fan. i might be wrong, it could be the Mac Pro fans. but anyhow, yes, i hear the fans all day long. not sure what causes this. i do know that the Quadro 4000 runs very hot.
 
bluesteel said:
i have a similar issue, but i thought it was the Quadro 4000's fan. i might be wrong, it could be the Mac Pro fans. but anyhow, yes, i hear the fans all day long. not sure what causes this. i do know that the Quadro 4000 runs very hot.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure it's the quadro fans, I have noticed this on my work computer, after I installed this card as well.
 
I installed dual video cards in my 06 Mac Pro a couple of weeks ago and the GPU/HDD fan runs at higher RPMs continually now. I'm guessing its just the mac pro increasing airflow to prevent overheating.
 
I recently installed a Quadro P4000 in my 2012 Mac Pro and have the same situation where the fan noise is significantly higher. I had hoped to record the occasional vocal in the same room but that won't be happening now. Has anyone found the fan speed to be unnecessarily high or is this just the price for using a powerful non-native card with NVIDIA drivers?
 
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