Zotac Gaming starts and stops cooling fan (RTX 3080)

This is my case with a Zotac Gaming Geforce RTX 3080 starting and stopping the cooling fans even when doing GPU work, like gaming or streaming.

Sometimes I have heard my graphics card starting and stopping the cooling fans and started to monitor what could have this behavior.

Using HWiNFO I monitored GPU RPMs and found it really was starting and reducing until 0 RPM again, regardless the GPU work, even when the card was idle.

Using Zotac Firestorm (the manufacture software) I have seen the GPU’s temperature near 50°C, using the “Auto” mode for the cooling fans.

Tweaking into the other options (manual and advanced), I found that fans set to RPMs under 30% keeps starting and stopping.

The workaround for me was to adjust the advanced graph until this behavior stopped and the cooling fans were always on.

Somehow I couldn’t prevent this behavior with a starting point under 20°C or 20% RPM. Now my cooling fans are always with a minimum of ~800 RPM. This is the advanced setting I found optimal for each fan group:

I’m almost sure this could be a problem with the manufacturer’s driver or software (they are updated to the latest version). It is clear that this is a misbehavior with temperature sensors or samples, because the values are not respecting my graph:

You can see in my graph that the 42°C temperature should set the fan speed to some value under 30%, but you also can see the fan speed reported by the software is 49%.

I’m not sure if this is a real problem with the manufacturer, but I read that starting and stopping cooling fans all the time (besides the annoying noise) could lead to malfunctional fans in the future.

So, this was my solution.

Edit: MSI Afterburner appears to be better in terms of configuration, but the minimum optimal setting for fans was that:

You can see that the minimum firmware speed is 30% but when I set the chart under 40% the fans stop again.