Ati Radeon HD fanspeed control in Ubuntu

Recently I had the pleasure of buying an ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card. It seems to be a decent card but the fan is a straight blade type and creates a lot of noise in my home theatre case.

   I was quite annoyed by this and after several hours of searching for an answer, all I could come up with was a bunch of commands to manually set the speed of the fan. This was a bit of an issure due to the fact that I would be using a remote control to set the fan speed.

  So I created a script that could be run with a dialogue box to set the fan to the desired speed. It works great for me and hopefully it will help you too. I would recommend placing the script in your ~/bin directory as I covered in a previous post (here).

  Once the script is in the ~/bin directory make it executable by opening up a terminal and typing

chmod +x ~/bin/fanspeed

  Now you cand right click on an empty space on your desktop and select "Create Launcher"

  Chose your settings as I have in the screenshot.

  The only thing that this requires is that you have set up the proprietary ATI driver and have it running prior to running this script.

  Now you can double click on the icon on your desktop or you can create a custom launcher for your gnome panel.

  Select the fan speed that you desire. and you should be all set. This script does not tell you the current temperature of your ati card but I may include that in a future release. Or if you would like to add it yourself, just post the code here in the comments section and I will include it in the file.

  When you launch the script you should see a box that looks like this one.

  I found that my card ran well at 33% even after running full screen video after half an hour. It seemed to keep my cards temp aroung 50 degrees.

  Your results may vary depending on your case ventelation and several other things. Try running this command to find out what the actual temperature of your card is.

aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-gettemperature

  I would recommend setting your fan speed to an acceptable noise level and then run some fullscreen video for a while and check the temp to see if this will work for you. If you would like to play with other fan speeds feel free to change the script as you need.

  I can't warn you enough. Do not set the speed below 20%. I tried this and the card temp rose VERY quickly. That is why the lowest number in the script is 20%.

  As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Comments

[Nico]

Thanks for the ATI Radeon HD fanspeed control using ATI driver in Ubuntu 8.10 how to.
I just installed Ubuntu 64bit on my Q9550 and I am using a 4870x2, until I found this page I was unable to run my ati card using the best os out there, my card was running at 82 degrees untill i set my card to 60% fan speed, now it is running at 50-54 degrees and i am loving it, I am using the ati 9.2 drivers

I can not thank you enough

regards

nico

[Depi]

Hey thanks for this one - worked for me. I have only one comment - on KDE one must install zenity before this will work.
My 4870 is right now running at 20% fan speed and 49 degrees. But my version has a better cooler than stock.
Anyway - my problem was not temperature, but the fact that the fan speeds up to max revs once in a minute or two. Annoys the hell out of me. Dunno why - temps are OK. Some nasty bug prolly...

All good now, but will have to run this every time I restart, right? Still - better than it was.. :)

Thanks again!