EDIT: It turned out to be a problem that fixed itself by uninstalling/reinstalling the driver (although the latest driver was already installed). The GPU Core Clock was running at a constant 1620 MHz, causing exceess heat. Uninstalling the video card driver via Windows Device Manager (and letting Windows install it again) brought things back to normal (idle GPU Clock now 253 MHz, temp aroun 45°C with fans off). I still have to use MSI Afterburner though because GPU Tweak stil doesn't work.
EDIT 2: Yesterday NVIDIA Control Panel decided to update the driver to the lates NVIDIA and a similar problem with the core clock arose (core clock locked at a low level). Reverted to Windows stock driver again (V372.54) to fix it So possibly this is a problem with the latest NVDIA Drivers (a 372.70 came with the downlaod).
Original Text:
I have a new Strix 1060 OCO and spent some time tracking down the fans doing pulsing / peridic start stop.
I have a setup (card, case, fans) where the temperature of the 1060 slowly but constantly rises (about 1°C per 30 seconds) in desktop operation with fans off.
So, in Desktop operation (with GPU-Tweak on Fan Auto/Default) fans start off until the temperature rises to 55°C. Then the fans rev up for and spin down immediately, going into some sort of cycle where they spin up for a moment, then spin off off again every two or three seconds.
It seems that the built-in (default) fan cycle is to kick the fans on when they reach 55°C and turn them off when the temp goes lower. With the three big fans, it appears that they are able to cool the GPU within a second so it builds a cycle of reving up shortly and then they are spinning down immediately (within half a second).
The constant spinning up and down is louder than contious coperation of the fans and it is quite annoying.
So the solution was to use a custom fan curve or fixed fan settings. However, this brings another issue (also with pulsing). When doing a user defined setting, it is necessary to set the fan duty value above 27% (in my case). The reason for that is that most fans have a power cliff at some point and act erratically when they are not given enough power (for example with 20% they either don't spin up at all or periodically spin up/down). It appears that the Strix fans in my card need at least 28%, so any settings have to be either zero (off) or at least 28% (for minimum operational speed).
Finally I'd like to recommed using MSI Afterburner instead of GPU Tweak, because it has an optional Hysteresis value setting for the user fan curves. What this does is that it acts as a threshold for turning the fans off, i.e. it keeps the fans spinning until the GPU cools down at least this value (e.g. with a Hysteresis of 5 and a kick-in temp of 60°C it will keep the fans running until the GPU goes down at least to 55°, avoiding the constant fast turn on/off cycles that GPU Tweak does).
Obviously the built-in (automatic) fan control should use some sort of hysteresis as well instead of spinning the fans up at 55° and down as soon as the temp falls to 54°
Hope any of this helps
