Hello, I recently upgraded my loop/case and now i can afford to have my fan curves a lot loose to have a more quiet build. So currently my rad fans spin at low rpm until they stop for a few seconds then ramp up to low rpm and so on. Is it bad for the fans in the long run to keep stopping and starting over and over? Should i make a slight more agressive curve so they don't stop at all?
depends who u ask, i not "fan" of fans the stop and start as needed, I rather they stay on and at low rpm and ramp up if needed I general go for the lowest static rpm I can get away with out compromising, cooling and noise as such most my fan in my pc are 1k rpm including the dual fan setup on my D14 Stop and go imo is good for anything imo
If the fans are stopping and then going again in a cyclic manner, without you having set somewhere that the fans should stop at a certain temperature, thats not good. You probably have too many fans on one header, or a too low fan speed/voltage set. Unless you have specified that the fans should stop (which is rare, even as a bios option) its too low.
As i said ,I made a curve that makes them stop for example when temps go under 40 degrees ,or have i not understood what you meant? While gaming they don't stop only when im browsing etc,they stop because of the "curve" that i set. I just want to know if it's healthy for them to stop like that,they do it quite often when idling because of the stupid amd boost that goes on and off like crazy. If it isn't healthy i can make a more aggressive curve so they never stop.
I'm sorry, it wasn't 100% clear (to me) that you had actually set the fans to stop. I don't think there would be any problem with that. Good quality fans of course. I'd leave some airflow for the motherboard components, some would rather have cooling than not.
leave fan running at the lowest speed they will keep running, most fan you can't hear after there below 800rpm less there the small fans, for 100mm and bigger you cant really hear fans at that speed. and special not inside of case less you have bad case
As already mentioned, there is no doubt that when it comes to durability and wear&tear, fans constantly going on/off is worse than having them engaged all the time. Proper way to do it is to have enough thermal headroom in your system to have your fans turned off for menial tasks without exceeding normal temperatures. And unless you can do that there is little point in having your fans turned off, only to have them turned off every few seconds. I'm all air and all my fans (cept CPU) are turned OFF, unless GPU or CPU goes above 50 Celsius for > 10 seconds. In essence, unless I am crunching or gaming, the only thing spinning is the CPU fan. The best thing about this setup is that the dust has become a non-issue.
I'm currently overkill with the thermal headroom as i'm cooling just my cpu but yea,i'll leave it as i have it now, running at low rpm while in low workloads. I see you're running an intel cpu, i think those manage loads better than AMD. My 2700x even when watching a video one moment its at 2.5ghz the next it jumps to 4.25ghz. https://i.**********/fb2SJRcC/sss.jpg As you can see it goes all over the place but at least fans don't ramp up between the middle circles and they keep silent at the same time.
Higher RPM does cause more stress to the fan since it's a mechanical part. So I'd say that 40% speed 50% of the time and 0% speed the other 50% of the time should have about the same effects on longevity as 20% speed 100% of the time. This is how I configured my fan curves in the BIOS. If I set 40C as the target CPU temperature and the minimum fan speed to 20%, I get fans that switch between 0 and 20% all the time. So what I do instead is change the minimum fan speed to 10% which keeps them active all the time at that speed because 10% speed is not enough to keep the CPU at 40C. It's always somewhat over 40C. So choose a minimum fan speed that is completely inaudible and set an appropriately low temperature target that simply cannot be achieved by such a low fan speed, but is close to your real target temp (like 5 or 7 degrees below what you really want.) I realize I might be wrong. But I've been using this setup for about 8 years now and the fans are still fine.
