Feronix
New member
Heya guys,
So as some of you may know I've got an EVGA GTX 760 SC, which is a lovely card, but it has a what I thought was vbios locked to a minimum of 40% fanspeed. Yesterday I took the plunge to mod the vbios though, as EVGA had told me this was the only solution.
Well, apparently they were wrong as even a new vbios with 31% minimum fanspeed instead of 43% still didn't help. Apparently it is hardware locked somewhere. Now I did think about soldering in a resistor but if the fan needs a minimum start up voltage of 5v (40%) it wouldn't start.
That could mean two scenarios:
1 - The fan will never spin up at all. Do not want.
2 - The fan will not spin at all in idle, but once there is load on the card it might reach the 7v start up point and then spin up. Could live with that but I'm not sure passive idle cooling would work on a reference card with a shroud and a mod like this is pretty difficult to reverse.
So I thought it'd be a lot easier to just replace the entire fan altogether. I realized this was possible when I disassembled the card for spray painting. The fan comes off like this
Then on the back of that the middle three screw (in the circle pattern) can be used to take the fan off and by the looks of it allow for replacement.
Now the original fan has a 4pin PWM connector like the one you can see, just to the right of the card's power connectors:
Here comes the maths bit.
Open HWMonitor tells me that in idle, thus 40% fanspeed it spins at 1590/1620 RPM. Which means that at a 100% it would be a ~4000 RPM fan.
I figured if I can find a ~3000 RPM PWM fan like that, it will do ~1200 RPM instead of 1600, pretty much the equivalent of 30% fanspeed on the original fan. So that should be a fair bit quieter.
I noticed the vbios on the card lets the fan spin at a maximum of 80%, but I've never seen it go above 60% even when benchmarking. Meaning that I have the margin to put on a slower spinning fan while still achieving similar cooling at roughly the same maximum noise output.
Max RPM:
Current fan 4000 / 100 * 60 = 2400 RPM
Replacement 3000 / 100 * 80 = 2400 RPM
Now the questions arises. Where would I be able to find a fan like that? :lol:
Any help would be massively appreciated guys. I had a quick hunt on the bay for 'GPU fans' but it only came up with the flat laptop ones. Tried 'blower fan' as well but they were all for cars and cost £100+
Thanks in advance!
So as some of you may know I've got an EVGA GTX 760 SC, which is a lovely card, but it has a what I thought was vbios locked to a minimum of 40% fanspeed. Yesterday I took the plunge to mod the vbios though, as EVGA had told me this was the only solution.
Well, apparently they were wrong as even a new vbios with 31% minimum fanspeed instead of 43% still didn't help. Apparently it is hardware locked somewhere. Now I did think about soldering in a resistor but if the fan needs a minimum start up voltage of 5v (40%) it wouldn't start.
That could mean two scenarios:
1 - The fan will never spin up at all. Do not want.
2 - The fan will not spin at all in idle, but once there is load on the card it might reach the 7v start up point and then spin up. Could live with that but I'm not sure passive idle cooling would work on a reference card with a shroud and a mod like this is pretty difficult to reverse.
So I thought it'd be a lot easier to just replace the entire fan altogether. I realized this was possible when I disassembled the card for spray painting. The fan comes off like this

Then on the back of that the middle three screw (in the circle pattern) can be used to take the fan off and by the looks of it allow for replacement.

Now the original fan has a 4pin PWM connector like the one you can see, just to the right of the card's power connectors:


Here comes the maths bit.
Open HWMonitor tells me that in idle, thus 40% fanspeed it spins at 1590/1620 RPM. Which means that at a 100% it would be a ~4000 RPM fan.
I figured if I can find a ~3000 RPM PWM fan like that, it will do ~1200 RPM instead of 1600, pretty much the equivalent of 30% fanspeed on the original fan. So that should be a fair bit quieter.
I noticed the vbios on the card lets the fan spin at a maximum of 80%, but I've never seen it go above 60% even when benchmarking. Meaning that I have the margin to put on a slower spinning fan while still achieving similar cooling at roughly the same maximum noise output.
Max RPM:
Current fan 4000 / 100 * 60 = 2400 RPM
Replacement 3000 / 100 * 80 = 2400 RPM
Now the questions arises. Where would I be able to find a fan like that? :lol:
Any help would be massively appreciated guys. I had a quick hunt on the bay for 'GPU fans' but it only came up with the flat laptop ones. Tried 'blower fan' as well but they were all for cars and cost £100+
Thanks in advance!