My EVGA 1080ti FE's blower fan is stuck at 100% speed and it's simply intolerable. Is this a hardware issue where something on the card has failed, or is there some driver or software issue that might be resolved? Anyone dealt with this before?
 
I got a 1080ti FE back in 2017 and the blower was working fine, ramping up and down as necessary. I got a water block for it and converted it to water cooling shortly thereafter, and used it that way until very recently when I replaced it in my main machine with a 3080ti FTW3.
 
I'm putting the 1080ti FE into a secondary machine that is air cooled, so last night I carefully removed the water block and replaced the original blower and housing, which I had preserved back in 2017 for just this kind of eventuality.
 
Upon firing up the machine with the now air-cooled 1080ti FE, the blower went to 100% instantly upon powering up the machine, and stays at 100% regardless of anything I've tried. I downloaded Precision X1 and it showed the blower topped out at something like 5k RPM, and Precision X1 actually shows the percentage of fan speed that it believes it's telling the blower to be at, which is simply ignored.
 
When I originally converted the card to water cooling, and again last night I worked slowly, methodically, and took great care when unplugging and plugging the two connectors from the housing to the PCB itself. I'm pretty darn sure I didn't stretch the wires, mishandle the connector ends, tweak the PCB headers, etc.
 
The card itself actually still works fine as a GPU, and the temperatures reported in Precision X1 while it idles are literally just above ambient.
 
Is it possible that something in the card having to do with fan control burnt out during the four years this card was my daily driver while it was water cooled, and I simply never noticed because the fans weren't being used?
 
I haven't tried disassembling the card and reassembling it again after removing and replacing the connectors, just to be sure. I'm going to do that later this morning, but anyone familiar with that generation of card knows it had like seven thousand different screws and I'm dreading having to do all that again.
 
I'm hoping this is a known issue with that generation of FE card. I realize all these cards came from NVidia and EVGA was just a reseller here, but I did get this from EVGA.

@Cool GTX, I'll go back and double-check all of those things.
 
The motherboard in that secondary machine used to be my main machine until earlier this year and had OC tweaks and whatnot setup in the BIOS. It's an X99 FTW K btw, and the CPU is a Core i7 6900 (8C/16T from the 2016 era). I reset the BIOS to all default settings as part of this, then re-enabled XMP and the appropriate CSM and UEFI settings to enable me to install Windows onto the NVMe drive. So the Windows 10 installation was performed after resetting the BIOS to defaults and then just enabling XMP and the CSM/UEFI stuff. It's a fresh installation because this is now a "new" machine and needs its own Windows license.
 
Since it was a fresh Windows installation I didn't have any OC tools running. I had to download Precision X1 and install it so I could look at what Precision X1 thinks the card is doing. What strikes me is that Precision X1 reports the fan as a percentage, fairly low, when in fact it's running at 100% full time. I can change fan control off Auto to manual and drag the slider around to different percentages and it changes nothing.
 
I'm going to go into the BIOS and check the Fast Boot setting. I presume Fast Startup in Windows is enabled if it's default because I haven't changed anything.
 
I'll look in Precision X1 to see if there's some option to reset the card to default settings. The card was run for around four years under water cooling, so whatever settings there are on the card that may relate to fan control were simply ignored that whole time, but the blower had been running fine under automatic control during the brief period four years ago before my water block showed up and I converted it.

sethleigh
Ok Fast Boot in the bios was off, changed it to ON. No change.
Ensured Fan Curve Control was selected in Precision X1, applied, no change.
Disconnected and reconnected power cables to the card, no change.
 
I'm about to remove and reseat the card itself.
 
Assuming that fails to change this, I'm going to have to disassemble and reassemble the card again, double-checking the two headers to ensure they're installed fully and with the headers in the proper orientation. I did the initial disassembly and conversion to water-cooling extremely slowly and carefully, and treated it the same way while reconverting it back to the original FE blower housing. I'll do it again.
 
I'm convinced it has to be something hardware, since it goes to 100% fan speed as soon as the machine powers up, before it even goes into Windows, and never drops to any lower speed even while Windows is loading, once it's booted up, etc. It's like the fan is getting the full 12V constantly. It has me worried that perhaps the voltage controller in the fan section of the PCB has malfunctioned or burned out or something, though I can't imagine why since a fan wasn't even used these past four years.
 

I've got a 1080 Ti FE that I stuck a hybrid on. I'm also running a X99 FTW K. Just to shorten your TS... I've never had any fan control issues regardless of any OS version or motherboard settings.
The PWM cooling fan with the Hybrid kit runs off the blower header on the GPU. So I'd expect if I had to go back to the blower, it would still function as the PWM cooling fan for the hybrid kit uses the same header. BTW the drive FET for the fan itself could have failed. A replacement fan might work.

I disassembled the card, scrutinized both the PWM header on the pcb and the connector on the wires and there was no obvious damage or anything wrong. I looked at all the components on the PCB and there were no parts where the magic smoke had obviously been released. Reassembled and carefully reseated, after blowing out the PCI-E slot connector with canned air, etc. No change. Fan still runs 5300-5500 RPM, which I assume is 100%. Still loud as a jet engine.
 
Yes, I've read before that the default for a PWM fan that's not receiving the control signal is for it to run at 100%. Could well be the case here that the PWM controller on this card has given up the ghost.
 
I'm going to open up a trouble ticket and see what they say.

I appreciate all the replies. I didn't try replacing the blower. As it turns out, when I got the card I'd paid extra for a five-year extended warranty. I submitted a support ticket, described all the symptoms and the steps I'd attempted to resolve it, including the fact that I'd disassembled and reassembled it, and the EVGA support engineer said it appeared something on the card was faulty and recommended that I return it for warranty repair or replacement. The RMA was approved, and as of yesterday morning the card is already in the mail back to EVGA. The secondary machine the 1080ti is destined for got my old EVGA GTX 960 as a temp, which I'm glad is still running.
 
This, folks, is another example of why I only buy EVGA graphics cards and have done since at least the early 2000s, and like to buy other EVGA products like power supplies and motherboards when feasible. The secondary machine is an x99 FTW K board, Supernova G2 850W PSU, and that 1080ti FE. My current primary machine uses the Supernova G6 850W and the 3080ti FTW3. It only uses a Gigabyte motherboard because EVGA's x570 board wasn't out yet. I got the 3080ti FTW3 through the Newegg Shuffle, and I really lucked out getting selected, too: I only submitted for EVGA cards, and they don't offer those in the Shuffle every day, and when they do it's usually one or two things, with the rest being MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc.
 
So yeah, thanks to you guys for the help, and thanks to EVGA for still being a company I very much prefer to do business with.

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