Tele42
commented
8 years ago "coolbits" as in 'hey that's a neat thing to have, but they can't make that default,' not 'make the video card run colder.' Most options exposed by coolbits will not void warranty, but this is a bad idea to ship in a widespread, untested fashion. If a video card is not providing a valid fan profile and nvidia's blob is not covering for the card vendor's firmware defect, then this is a hardware bug and must be resolved by either your card vendor with an updated firmware or by nvidia with a driver update.
Controlling a videocard's fan from userspace has been established as reckless in general, the card must be able to protect itself from overheating, even if the host OS has gone silent (crashed).
JoshuaMurphynz
When I play CS:GO on SteamOS without fps limiter at my desktop system (Nvidia GTX 680) it is getting very hot after some time. The reason for this is that there is no dynamic fan control by default. The GPU fan is always working at 20%.
On Windows there is a solution shipped with the Nvidia driver I think. On Linux you have to set the coolbits in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and use a script like this one to control the fan on demand. Adding this script as a systemd service is a working solution for my debian system.
But as far as i know you will lose your GPU warranty by using the coolbits. So if I'm right this won't be a acceptable solution for SteamOS (or any other distro).
I don't know if this problem is Nvidia specific. Maybe AMD or Intel users can give feedback in here as well.
Anyway I think Nvidia has to provide a way to cool GPU without losing warranty. Maybe they can add dynamic fan control to their drivers or allow fan-control without setting a coolbit.
And SteamOS has to ship this solution by default. (maybe create a debian package to contibute to many distros)