Nvidia GTX 470 GPU - How do I control the Fan Speed

jagdpanther · l33t Joined: 22 Nov 2003 Posts: 768

I have a fancy new graphics card, EVGA GTX 470. From Linux how do I control the fan-speed?

nvclock does not seem to support the GTX 4XX cards.

nvidia-settings-195.36.24 shows the fan speed but does not allow setting.

I have not tried nvidia-driver-256.35 and nvidia-settings-256.35. They are hard masked. (I don't know if they will solve the fan control issue or not.)

Any suggestions?

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

The latest nvidia drivers are masked because people keep finding issues with the nvidia-drivers ebuild. I believe that the corresponding nvidia-settings are masked because they are meant to be used with the masked drivers. There is an open bug report tracking issues with the drivers:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321061

While there are no known issues with the ebuild itself, nvidia's drivers have had a bug in their kernel compatibility layer for about 6 months now. The drivers you have installed suffer from it, but it only affects linux kernels 2.6.33 or newer. If you use kernel 2.6.33 or newer, it is probably advisable to move the ebuild to a local overlay and patch it. You could can use the 256.29-fix-acpi_walk_namespace-params-order.patch patch from the bug report to patch the 256.35 drivers. A patch exists for the 195.36.24 drivers as well, but you will have to look for it at nvnews.net if you want to use it with them.

While I do not know if installing the latest drivers will fix your issue, I have a Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 in my desktop and a Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GS in my laptop; both are using the 256.35 drivers and aside from the cpi_walk_namespace-params bug, which is resolved by the patch, I have not encountered any issues.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

nvidia-settings (195.36.31) isn't able to do that for my card while nvclock is.

i'm afraid you'll have to wait nvclock update, except if nvidia add it to latest drivers because the drivers couldn't even it's possible.

jagdpanther · l33t Joined: 22 Nov 2003 Posts: 768

Guess I should have listened:
I unmerged nvidia-drivers and nvidia-settings and ran NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-256.35.run. Well X seemed to work well untill I tried my favored game (Dominions3) and pushed the OpenGL sequence ... X froze up. I had to ssh into the system to reboot it. I am back at 195.36.24.

I hope I don't have the bug Shining Arcanine mentioned as I am using nvidia 195.36.31 and Linux kernel 2.6.34.1.

I guess I'll wait on GPU fan speed control under Linux.

(If I reboot into W..7 to play a game, I can always use After Burner for GPU fan speed control.)