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Headless Fan Control via Command Line for RTX 2060 & 2070

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2019 1:34 am
by gordonbb
I’m running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS Server Headless and noticed that the version 410 Linux in the ppa as well as the version in the CUDA toolkit both do not support Fan Control via NVidia-settings using the Command line with Coolbits 4 set but this does work from the GUI.

Driver 415 has fixed this for the RTX 2070 but the command line is still broken for the RTX 2060.

Other than hooking a display up running the GUI from another Xserver will enable adjusting the Fans.

Generally I do find Boost 3 does the trick but in dual GPU systems I find the upper GPU tends to run a little hotter than I like (mid to high 70s) so I prefer to set the fan 5-10% higher than Boost does to run the card cooler and get an extra Bin in Boost.

Re: Headless Fan Control via Command Line for RTX 2060 & 207

Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:10 am
by gordonbb
Update ...

Did some poking around using the curren 418 drivers from the Canonical PPA and Nvidia has changed the model with the RTX cards. In the past with dual fan cards on Pascal (GTX) both cards were driven by and reporting on a single channel. With RTX and Nvidia moving from a blower style reference card with one fan to a dual fan design each of the fans are now individually addressable. So [fan0] and [fan1] refer to the two fans in the first card and [fan2] and [fan3] refer to the fans in the second card and so forth.

So when you are using nvidia-settings to adjust the fan speed you should adjust both fans at the same time. Likewise nvidia-settings can be queried to report the speed in RPM of both fans. nvidia-smi, however, still reports the fan speed as a percentage but only for the first fan on a card.

Of interest is there now appears to be a bit mask setting to set the reference for the Fan Control to a combination of GPU, Memory and Power presumably using internal temperature sensors for the GPU, Memory and VRMs. This may be of interest if one were to modify the card and install a GPU block covering just the GPU then one fan header could be tied to GPU for the pump and radiator fan and the other header tied to Memory and Power and tied to a cooling fan for the other components.

Re: Headless Fan Control via Command Line for RTX 2060 & 207

Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2019 1:58 am
by MeeLee
It depends from card to card.
I know Zotac and PNY use the cheapest form of connecting to a fan,
Even my MSI card, with 3 fans, has only 1 fan controller.
EVGA and ASUS cards sometimes have 2 (or more) fan controllers.

Is there a way you could set your system using X-server (desktop gui), and then do a Sudo init 3 (or something), when everything is set correctly?

Also, it's best to use a blower type of card above an open card, so it'll help suck out any hot air out of the case (at the cost of it running slightly higher fan settings).

I am currently running driver version 418.56.
They've done a lot of fixes on this driver!