NV Silencer 5 drawing too much current

[Hawaiian2002]

I have a Geforce 6800NU PCIe card with a newly installed NV Silencer 5. I am having problems with occassional unknown "CPU usage" about 40 to 50% and slowly tailing off to nothing. After painful troubleshooting, I have discovered the following: The card has some sort of "smart fan" operation. Whenever it senses a heavy load the fan spins up faster. It is really evident with the stock cooling fan because it is really loud. That is why I purchased this NV silencer. After I installed the silencer was when I started having problems. Everytime the video load got heavy my cpu usage would go up as explained above. It seems that the NV silencer fan is drawing too much current when it tries to spin faster and it is causing my cpu usage to go up. I put back the stock fan and I am back to normal. This is my configuration:

MSI nforce4 sli (one 6800NU card)
480 watt antec PS (2 1/2 years old - 20 pin)

I was thinking that perhaps I need a 24pin power supply? I was reading that the extra 4 pins may be for the PCIe port. Perhaps my video card needs more power. It does not have its own power connector like the 6800U. I was also thinking to power up the fan via the 4 pin molex connector and some sort of adapter. Anyone have suggestions?

 

[fstime]

I really doubt somthing so simple as chaning the heatsink on the gpu can affect anything. You are right however, the fan speeds up and down by it self. This can be controlled by downloading expertool which allows you to controll the fan speed.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Hawaiian2002
It seems that the NV silencer fan is drawing too much current when it tries to spin faster and it is causing my cpu usage to go up.

No, the silencer drawing too much current cannot CAUSE the CPU usage to go up. The CPU usage is not controlled by the current drawn from the PSU!

The CPU usage goes up because there is graphics card activity that requires CPU performance. This coincides with the silencer fan RPM going up since the GPU activity heats up the GPU.

 

[Hawaiian2002]

No, the silencer drawing too much current cannot CAUSE the CPU usage to go up. The CPU usage is not controlled by the current drawn from the PSU!

I understand your reasoning but I have had this problem for about a month and this is what is happening. I do not understand it either. With the nv silencer, I can hear the fan start to spin up faster and this is when the cpu usage increase occurs. The fan does not spin up as much as with the stock fan (stock fan would have about a 100% increase is fan speed, the nv silencer about 10%).

Also, the system was working fine with the stock fan, bad with the nv silencer, then fine with the stock fan again.

 

[KBTuning]

uhh... if your putting a load on the gpu then you have already put a load on the cpu..... thing about it if you stress your video card your stressing the whole system therefor you WILL have more cpu usage.... get over it.... when you even open IExplorer you goto 100% cpu usage even if only for a second... atleast i do and have since ive been using computers.... and even now my A64 hit 100%.... you worry to much about cpu usage...

 

[Navid]

You may have a faulty silencer fan.
While removed from the motherboard, you can connect the silencer fan (unplug connector from card) to a 12V source through a current meter. If the measured current is over 0.3A, the fan is malfunctioning.

But, this has nothing to do with the CPU load.

 

[Hawaiian2002]

uhh... if your putting a load on the gpu then you have already put a load on the cpu..... thing about it if you stress your video card your stressing the whole system therefor you WILL have more cpu usage.... get over it.... when you even open IExplorer you goto 100% cpu usage even if only for a second... atleast i do and have since ive been using computers.... and even now my A64 hit 100%.... you worry to much about cpu usage...

My CPU usage starts anywhere from 40 to 50% as mentioned above. It will last anywhere from 1 minute to 10 minutes (however long the fan is accelerated). During this time the mouse will jitter around making normal tasks very difficult. If you pull up the task manager you can see the chart of cpu usage in a steep rise and then tail off slowly (again, 1 to 10 minutes). This is not normal. I would not even check my cpu usage if it had not been for the difficulty I have been having just getting around the desktop.

Seems that everyone so far does not believe that cpu usage and the gpu fan can be related in any way. It does not make sense to me either but I am just stating what I see. This is not my opinion. That is why I am asking for intelligent suggestions.

 

[Hawaiian2002]

I can now verify the the fan speed on my nv silencer5 is causing the problem. I reinstalled the 6800 with the nv silencer 5. I download the expertool utility and played with the fan speed. Everytime I boosted to fan speed to 100% the CPU usage would go up and my system would be come unstable. To verify that I am not affected by the graphics processing, I boosted the fan speed while not having any applications open at all. I think by isolating the fan speed from any type of graphics processing you would have to conclude the the fan speed of my nv silencer 5 is affecting my cpu usage.

Has anyone had any problems with the nv silencer fan doing this?

 

[stelleg151]

I am hard pressed for ideas, but maybe the increase in fan speed heats up your case significantly, causing intense thermal throttling??? I know its farfetched, but given your situation, I have no other ideas, very very strange indeed.

 

[Navid]

I suggest that you check the stability of your system, without the silencer, by running prime95 torture test overnight. I suspect that your system is unstable anyway!
I cannot see how the silencer could make your CPU unstable.

Run prime95 overnight. Is it still running the next day? If not, your system is not stable.
If it is running the next day, please now install the silencer and run prime95 overnight again. If now it fails to run prime95 overnight (and it succeeded in running it without the silencer), you may have a point!

 

[Hawaiian2002]

Ran Prime95 for 7 hrs with no errors. I am currently using Expertool with a fixed 50% fan speed. Since I've been using the Expertool I have not had any problems. This is of course a "band aide" approach so I would still like to get to the root of the problem. I ordered a 20 to 24 pin adapter and will try that.

 

[Hawaiian2002]

Installed the 20 to 24 pin adapter and things seem to be a lot better. I can set my fan control back to normal (dynamic) and I do not have any problems. When I run a program like 3dmark I can hear the fan speed increase but my cpu usage does not go up like before. Everything runs stable after the initial startup. I notice at startup that I still have higher than normal cpu usage for about a minute. Once it subsides, I do not have any more problems. I wish that I could say that it is positively the power adapter but there is still something odd when I boot up. For now, this is a lot better than before. I can live with this!

 

[Lemodular]

what processes are you running? Check task manager and look at cpu usage by application, System Idle Prcess should be 99% if you are not doing anything.

 

[Hawaiian2002]

I was still getting intermittant problems so I put back my stock cooler and I have been running perfect for 3 weeks now. Sent the Silencer back to SVC. We'll see what happens when and if I get a replacement.