Have a gtx980ti passed to an osx sierra vm and all running perfect and performance as expected. But fans seem to keep spinning at high speed even when nothing is running. If i stop the vm the fans stop.

Same card in my hackintosh workstation , same os same gpu drivers card fans mostly idle unless heavy used.

 

Any ideas ?

Flashed a new fancurve in the BIOS where it should only come on at 50C. >> same thing, fans stay spinning from VM boot. (fancurve works fine in hackintosh workstation)

Passed romfile to vm >> same , fans stay spinning from VM boot.

 

Am out of ideas.

 

Anyone ????????

Just so you know, the VBIOS passthrough was added for GTX 10 series and RTX cards because NVidia encrypted the VBIOS, as well as the connection between the drivers and the VBIOS...  VBIOS passthrough is a workaround to fix this in Windows...

 

One way you can tell that this is not needed is you can edit your bios with an editor and make your own with your own fan curve and such, all of us 10 series people don't get those, and probably never will...

 

From what I understand there is a driver telling the card to do what it is doing, because if there was no driver yet, then the default settings in the VBIOS would still be in charge...

 

Some possible sources for drivers are:

UnRaid:

Edit your Syslinux config to include all the PCI ids for your card to use the VFIO driver, this prevents UnRaid/Linux from assigning any drivers of its own to it..

kernel /bzimage
append vfio-pci.ids=10de:1b81,10de:10f0 initrd=/bzroot

(Edit this to match all the device ids on your particular card, just don't add the PCIe slot to the list...)

This does make the card not work outside of a VM passthrough situation...

 

or

 

Windows:

You have not installed any fan control software for your card... If you have an EVGA card, download and install EVGA Precision XOC... Or you can install MSI afterburner on nearly any card (even EVGA if you like it better)...  This should allow you to control the card like it would outside of a VM...

Edited February 9, 20197 yr by Warrentheo

Tnx for your reply.

As i am only using macs (hackintosh and vm’s) i am very used to flashing the bios of these cards.

As there is no overclocking software on windows, i tune the bios so its hardcoded and  in does not rely on any drivers etc.

thats the wierd thing as i would have expected the fan curve in the bios to be doing its thing regardless of the card running in a physical hadkintosh or in a vm hadkintosh (exact same os version and nvidia drivers btw).

i have the pci ids already in there so its not used by unraid.

If i stop the vm, the  card fans stop,  so its is definately something in the vm that is overruling the cards bios.

My original though was maybe its not getting the info hence my attempt to pass the dumped vbios , but that made no difference.

 

Everything else is working perfect and the card performs on par with the same card in the physical hack.  Its just the fans are wierd. Maybe something with the fact that also no temp values are available in the vm. Maybe they are needed and if not available the driver overrules the card fan curves or something . I am out of ideas.

 

Edited February 9, 20197 yr by glennv

Ps tried some mac fan control programs but they say no fans detected on this computer. Thats to be expexted as hacks need to go the bios route. But some at least display the fan speed. Not in this case.

Fixed the problem . Was related to my own modified bios i had flashed to these cards. Was a bit too agressive apparently on the different power states minimum voltage (to reduce fluctuation and increase stability in high overclocks), which was great for a real hackintosh, but  which made the card behave differently in a VM somehow. 

I noticed when i saw the same or worse behaviour when i tried to get it to work properly on a W10 VM. It would not even work at all (the dreaded error 43) , untill i reflashed it slighly more conservative and all problems disappeared.