ROG Strix 2080 Ti OC broken fan behavior

[Buschti]

EDIT: got the card RMA'd and got a replacement


Hey there,

I have had my 2080 Ti since the mid of october 2018. It has been working fine, other than propably beeing the worst overclocking card in the history of 2080 Ti's (highest sustainable clock ist about 1935 Mhz).
Since a couple weeks ago, I noticed that the fans of the card sometimes ramped up to what sounded like 100% fan speed and then came back down. I searched this and other forums for the same problem, but couldn't find any pertaining to the 2080 series of cards. So I started monitoring temperatures and they were never out of spec, like 80°C maximum or so.
So today I tried to narrow down the problem: I had the card set to the standard bios and everything in MSI Afterburner to stock. No fan revving appeared and temperatures were around 72°C.
When I started overclocking the card and temperature climbed towards the 77°C to 78°C range the fan revving appeared again.
After that I tried the silent bios, to see if it behaved any differently. So every setting back to stock and low and behold after the temperatures reached 77°C+ the fans reved to 100% again.
Mind you everytime this happened I had a close look at Afterburner so see what the fan speed looked like in the software. It never changed when the revving happened and I even closed Afterburner just to check that it is really not the software doing something funky to the cards fans.
So with the silent bios selected, I didn't even have to apply any overclock for the revving to happen. And when I maxed out the power limit the temperature would rise a bit mor obviously and then the revving went on for even minutes at a time
One time the revving even started around 73°C while playing a game and woulnd't stop. But I could not replicate the revving in my testing with such a low temperature again.

So in conclusion: The fan revving seems to be connected to the temperature of the card. Doesn't matter if an overclocking software is running or not and all the settings within the software don't seem to matter as well only if the side effect of the settings raises the temperature above a certain point.
With the silent bios selected and just upping the power limit to 125% I can reproduce this erroneous behavior every time.

I don't have any other ideas for what I could do to fix the fan rev, so my hope is someone here can help my or/and if not I can RMA the card and get one without this problem.

Best regards

[Silent_Scone]

I would suggest trying on a fresh/dummy operating install without any software or polling tools such as After Burner installed. If this doesn't solve the issue, contact support for your region to process an RMA.

[Buschti]

Silent Scone@ASUS wrote:
I would suggest trying on a fresh/dummy operating install without any software or polling tools such as After Burner installed. If this doesn't solve the issue, contact support for your region to process an RMA.

Thanks for the quick reply!
Just tried your suggestion: Installed a fresh, new copy of Windows 10 and some drivers and a benchmark. Switched to the silent BIOS to get the temperatures going and low and behold, the same thing happened. The temperature settled in after a few minutes and roughly every 30 seconds from there on, the fans would rev up to 100% for 2 to 3 seconds and calm back down again.
So I guess I'll have to RMA this card, but thanks for the suggestion none the less.

[Silent_Scone]

Buschti wrote:
Thanks for the quick reply!
Just tried your suggestion: Installed a fresh, new copy of Windows 10 and some drivers and a benchmark. Switched to the silent BIOS to get the temperatures going and low and behold, the same thing happened. The temperature settled in after a few minutes and roughly every 30 seconds from there on, the fans would rev up to 100% for 2 to 3 seconds and calm back down again.
So I guess I'll have to RMA this card, but thanks for the suggestion none the less.

Have you tried creating a less aggressive fan curve via GPUTweak 2?

[Yolofant]

I have exactly the same card and got the same problem. Once my card reaches 76 degrees the fans go up to 100%. Afterburner or the Asus GPU Tweak still show that the fan is running at a low percentage but from the reported fan rpm the fans are running at 100%. It is not possible to control the fans using a custom fan curve because it is just ignoring any setting once it goes past 76 degrees.

[Buschti]

Yolofant wrote:
I have exactly the same card and got the same problem. Once my card reaches 76 degrees the fans go up to 100%. Afterburner or the Asus GPU Tweak still show that the fan is running at a low percentage but from the reported fan rpm the fans are running at 100%. It is not possible to control the fans using a custom fan curve because it is just ignoring any setting once it goes past 76 degrees.

Exactly: Once the tempereature reaches a certain point, you can not control the fans anymore.
That is why I just RMA'd my card today.

[Yolofant]

There was another thread in which the issue was solved by putting the card into another PCIe slot, which might be worth trying. I don't have a replacement card so I'm concerned to send it to RMA because it will take quite some time until I receive the card back. Seems like I'm not too lucky with the RTX 2080 Ti series. I had two MSI 2080 Ti prior to this Asus one which both broke as well. 😞

[StealthRain]

Exactly same problem here. Fans at a certain point just ramp up and I can't control them.
In my case ASUS doesn't replace/repair the GPU and just send my RMA back. Anyone had more success with their RMA?
Don't really know what to do at this point..

[Liksi]

I have the same problem except mine is RTX 2080 OC8 non TI version. Card hit 70c and it goes 100% then down then 100%. It occurs less if I use silent preset in GPU TweakII but with gaming preset it's like a jet testing its throttles.

[Liksi]

StealthRain wrote:
Exactly same problem here. Fans at a certain point just ramp up and I can't control them.
In my case ASUS doesn't replace/repair the GPU and just send my RMA back. Anyone had more success with their RMA?
Don't really know what to do at this point..

Okay. I tried placing my GPU back to mobo PCIE instead of my horizontal mounted PCIE. The fans work the right way now. Before, I can't even manually control the fans. Now whenever I change it to manual control it applies the change right away!