Karnosiris said:
A friend of mine recently recommended I turn up the fan speed on my XFX 7950 Black Edition. I was getting roughly 50-55c with one or three programs running (firefox, Steam, that kind of thing). When under load it jumped up to anywhere between 55-70c (depending on the game), which is the highest I've seen it go. This was with fan speeds on 20%.
I've screwed them up to 45% now and my temps have dropped by about 10c, but after doing a few google searches I've read that stressing the fans can decrease the lifespan of a GPU even more than high temps due to them breaking earlier. I couldn't find a clear answer on which is preferable though. Can anyone here help me out?
Believe it or not, the people manufacturing graphics cards actually know a thing or two about graphics cards (yes even XFX!!!). Shocking, I know. And believe it or not, the people making video cards, the guys that actually designed it and put it together and everything even know more about them than random people talk to on the internet! Even more shocking, I know.
Anyways, the moral of the story is, unless you know what you are doing and have a specific reason to, don't f with the thing. Really. The people building it actually do have a clue, and if for some reason you don't trust them, buy a different brand.