alt Hacker News> "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control)
Why though? I generally don't care about the specific temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%.
I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same, cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the simpler the better.
I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to do here.
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This could be total nonsense and I am definitely out on a limb here, but I remember from my amateur crypto mining days (almost 15 years ago wow) that keeping everything relatively consistent is better for the longevity of your hardware (GPU/CPU mainly). Some people obsessed over getting temps as low as possible but that’s not very productive, diminishing returns and all of that. There is just generally a healthy temperature to keep things operating at most of the time, coupled with how hard you push the component in question (while not putting too much strain on your fans either). Basically: swinging/fluctuating is not good, consistency is good.
Again though I could be totally off. I just remember that being spread around as “conventional wisdom.”
In my case the gpu fan was not changing speed automatically, (something, something, linux) which I discovered after an embarrassingly long time of poking at other things trying to figure out why my system was crashing so much. And now instead of doing the sane thing and figuring out how to get the fan speed map to work, I thought about it and came to this conclusion "I want my temps to be set value, say 45C, why not use a closed loop controller to find the fan speed necessary for that temp at any load?"
And now am about halfway through building pid fan control software and a janky gpu temp simulator so I can get some intuition on tuning the pid parameters before I set it on my actual gpu. you know, the fun part of computing. But now I am worried that perhaps there is a real reason nobody does it this way.