RivaTuner – Taking Control of Graphic Card Fans

As graphics cards get a bit long in the tooth they may have to work at their peak performance for longer to let you play the latest games at an acceptable level compared to the latest cards which might use less of their overall capacity (which may also run cooler). As such, your old graphics card may run hotter for longer particularly if you’ve not given them a good clean recently to remove dust build up in the fans and heatsinks.

Normally, your graphics card should monitor temperatures automatically and adjust fan speeds to suit but you may want to set this manually yourself. This can be useful if you are trying to troubleshoot crashing games and you suspect that heat is the issue. To help you work out if this is a problem you can use something called GPU Temp to capture temperature data.

Anyway, if you fancy tweaking fan speeds then you should look into using a piece of software called RivaTuner. Bear in mind, RivaTuner supports pretty much every nVidia graphics card from the Riva TNT series up to the latest cards but only supports more recent ATI video cards in comparison. Once installed, it’s fairly simple to set the fan speed as follows:

1. Launch RivaTuner,
2. On the Main tab, under the drop down menu click the icon to the right of the word Customize,
3. Click on the first icon in the menu of a graphics card,
4. On the next window, tick  Enable low-level fan control,
5. Put the dot next to Fixed and the drag the slider to something decent,
6. Click Apply.

1. Launch RivaTuner,
2. On the Main tab, under the drop down menu click the icon to the right of the word Customize,
3. Click on the first icon in the menu of a graphics card,
4. Put the dot next to Auto and the drag the slider to something decent,
5. Click Apply.

If you found that cranking up the fans to a set speed helped to alleviate crashing then you mix consider giving the inside of your computer case a clean (or getting an experienced person to do it if you’re unsure)or  cleaning your graphics cards, At a last resort, you may also want to consider upgrading your graphics card(s).