Mini Guide: Using “Fan Control” to Save a Broken GPU

A short while back, I took a punt on a broken Dell OEM RTX 3060 Ti from our local eBay competitor – TradeMe.co.nz. As an aside, eBay has never managed to get a foothold on the Aotearoa New Zealand market space as TradeMe offers such a dominant solution. I was in the market for a budget upgrade to my ASUS TUF RTX2060 that I purchased in mid-2020 – an excellent, albeit noisy card.
The card was advertised as ‘working’, but with non-functional fans. Perusing the images included in the auction, it just looked like the ground wire on one of the fan headers had come loose, likely from an inexperienced tinkerer replacing the thermal paste. I took a risk and hit ‘Buy Now’, at NZ$399 (US$235 at time of writing). For reference, non-mined, Large Form Factor RTX 3060 Ti cards are selling for around NZ$100-200 more. SFF offerings here in the land of the long white cloud are generally quite limited...

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[rfarmer]

I've seen this fan control before and it has some very useful features. One feature I really liked is an adjustable delay before increasing fan speed, this should really help with AMDs micro spikes and keep the fan from constantly ramping up and down.

 

[SFFMunkee]

Hey JM, nice write up! I’ma BIG… fan… of this software. I use it extensively.

One of my absolute very very favourite features is being able to create a custom temperature “sensor” with an average temperature over time of a sensor!

This, for me, means I can avoid the brief whirr as my Ryzen chip or GPU has a quick temperature spike that settles in a couple of seconds, but will spin up happily with a sustained load!

 

[alski]

Fan Control is based on open source code, something I am very supportive of, especially as developers have a tendency to come and go, leaving abandonware in their wake. If Rémi Mercier, the developer of the software, ever moves on, I’m sure there will be another developer there to pick up the torch and keep moving.

The downloads are available in an OpenSource project, Rem0o/FanControl.Releases
the base LibreHardwareMonitor libraries are OpenSource , but the actual FanControl source is not.

This is the release repository for Fan Control, a focused and highly customizable fan controlling software for Windows.
Sources for this software are closed.

As it stands, if Rémi were hit by a bus today, this could become abandonware.