6650XT Not gaming, Linux Fedora. This card is way overpowered for my current use. I have 2 monitors each slightly over 2K (2880x1620) plus one at 4K, so more than a typical number of pixels being refreshed, but not gaming nor streaming so insignificant work for the GPU. I hope to be using this card for many years while switching to higher resolution displays. I had my last card (the other brand) for 12 years.
Most of the time, the card reports using only 19 or 20 watts. Currently in a cold room, under default settings, the fan comes on at 20% after the gpu has been at 58c for several seconds, and takes only 2 to 5 seconds to cool it to 51c, then turns off for a few minutes to get back up to 58c.
I was worried that the frequent temperature swing would eventually be harmful, even though the temperatures themselves were fine. I set a minimum fan power of 7%, which gives a fan speed of 6.3% and a stable temperature flipping slowly between 34c and 35c. I assume that is better for gpu life. Is it worse for fan life?
After 12 years of steady use, the fan on my last graphics card was in bad shape, while the gpu was fine.
I haven't yet figured out how to make this setting permanent in Linux (it currently goes away each time the system sleeps or boots and needs to me manually re-applied). But the bigger question is whether I should.
BTW, I chose this card both to get 4k 60hz output on the hdmi connector and to have enough ram to be reliably instant when moving or closing a window to reveal the window behind it. Both the card it replaced and a fairly new card I have in a different computer did the 4K only at 30hz (at the same time doing a pair of 2k+ at 60hz on other connectors). The old one with 0.5GB ram always had a slow repaint when revealing a window that had been hidden. The other card was 4GB and very rarely needed to repaint to reveal a window. But I bought this 8GB one to have some future proofing.
