▷ How to create a ventilation curve to a graphics card

As graphics cards become more powerful, the need to efficiently dissipate heat also increases to prevent overheating. While custom heatsinks tend to do enough work, reference heatsinks are sometimes too tight on performance, making temperature management while trying to achieve a stable overclock much more difficult. How to create a ventilation curve to a graphics card

Why good graphics card cooling is important

All graphics cards need to operate within a temperature range considered safe by their manufacturer. In the event that the temperature exceeds this limit, the graphics card will drop in frequencies and performance to generate less heat and prevent the temperature from continuing to rise. This is especially important in the case of Nvidia, as its graphics cards are capable of increasing their operating frequency beyond the specified turbo speed if the temperature is low enough. The majority of users aim to keep their graphics card below 80ºC when fully loaded, since in this way its potential can be fully exploited.

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Learn how to configure a ventilation curve to a graphics card with MSI Afterburner

Problems like thermal regulation occur more frequently and hamper your efforts to get precious FPS for poorly cooled graphics cards. All this can be solved very easily by managing the speed of your fan and achieving a better balance between noise and performance. For this we can take advantage of the characteristics of the fan profile in the MSI Afterburner utility.

The first step is to download the latest version of Afterburner from the MSI website. Once the app is installed, you'll notice that the user interface is quite simple, but if you click on the little gear, it will present a variety of options to keep you busy for hours.

Before starting to configure your fan profile, we recommend that you check the option to start Afterburner with Windows. There is nothing more annoying than loading a game to discover that your fan is not behaving as you expected. Click on the " Fan " tab to get started.

The next step is to configure the operating curve of the graphics card fans. The vertical numbers represent the fan speed, while the horizontal numbers represent the temperature. The default curve has a 1: 1 ratio that often leads to thermal constriction, as the fan speed does not increase fast enough to dissipate additional heat. By simply moving the dots back a little, we can solve any potential regulatory problem. By clicking on the curve, you can add a new point to manipulate, allowing it to make more precise adjustments.

It is important to take the necessary time with this, since you will need to keep the fan within the noise levels that you consider acceptable. It can be very convenient to run a benchmark to check noise levels. If the fan is still too high, you can re-mark the profile a bit. Once you are satisfied with the temperature and noise levels of your ventilation curve, click "OK" and save your settings in one of the 5 available profiles shown at the bottom right of the main user interface.

We recommend reading our guide to the best graphics cards on the market

This ends our tutorial on how to create a ventilation curve for a graphics card, we hope you found it useful to get more out of your card. Remember that you can share it on social networks so that it can help more users who need it.