GTX 560 Irregular Fan Behavior

[nophilip]

I recently purchased a new Asus GTX 560 card. I installed it in my rig and it's now exhibiting some strange behavior when under load (sometimes, but not all the time). Sometimes the fans will spin up very loud for about 15 seconds and then stop. For example, when I'm playing SWTOR, it does this approximately every 2 minutes.

I've been monitoring the card with MSI Afterburner and during the times when the fan is loud the fans' RPM jumps up from about 1500-2000 to about 4200.

I never got this behavior with my old GTX 260 and I'm wondering what's going on.

 

[internetswag]

The fans start to speed up when it reaches a certain temperature, then slow down once the temperature lowers again.

A steadily climbing GPU temperature suggests poor case cooling.