We recently looked at different profiles in AMD Software, and today we’ll dive deeper into adjusting the fan control settings in more detail. First, we’ll test how fan performance affects the card’s behavior across the entire working range of fan speeds. Then we’ll focus on how fan control behavior differs between automatic and manual fan-speed settings, and on how to set the fan-control curve settings for the card.
Recently, in the article Tuning Gigabyte AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT in AMD Software, we took a closer look at how you can influence the card’s performance, power consumption, and other characteristics using the various profiles in the AMD software.
Today, we will focus on the cooling control settings, which determine how loud the card will be and what temperatures the components will reach. To a certain extent, it also affects performance.
AMD allows you to directly enable or disable the card’s passive cooling under low load within the AMD software and directly set the fan speed control curves based on temperature. However, there is one rather significant catch—under automatic control, the card behaves differently than when you set the curves manually. We will break this down directly in the graphs showing operational characteristics in the following chapters.
The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC itself is discussed in detail in the first review. For the post-launch review, I had a card with Hynix memory chips; for today’s article, we are using a different unit equipped with Samsung memory chips.
Before we dive in, just a reminder of the basic parameters. The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC has its boost clock increased from the reference 2970 MHz to 3060 MHz. The stated typical game clock is increased from 2400 MHz to 2520 MHz. In practice, the actual clock values are again higher. With the increased clocks, the power limit (TBP) is also raised from the reference 304 W to 330 W.
The card has a dual BIOS. You can switch between Performance and Silent modes, which again differ only in the cooling control settings. We looked at how the card behaves with the Silent and Performance BIOS last week; today, I will test various settings in the drivers, but only in the quieter Silent mode.
HWINFO provides information from the following sensors.
The next chapter contains a detailed description of the test system on which we will try out how the various settings affect the card’s behavior, and after that, we will dive into the test results for the different cooling settings.
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