nfancurve

A small and lightweight bash script for using a custom fan curve in Linux for those with an Nvidia GPU.

You are probably wondering why I have chosen to write this script in Bash. The reason is very simple; I wanted a script with the minimum number of dependencies possible. To get this script up-and-running you technically only need the temp.sh file. The script itself is supposed to be quite lightweight. Although I'm more comfortable with something along the lines of Python or C, I felt that this was a perfect opportunity to improve on my Bash skills.

The current version of the script is version 13.

This script is currently set up for Celsius. However, it can easily be modified for other temperature scales.

If you need any help configuring my script or don't know how to make it start automatically check the USAGE.md file.

Features

• by default it has an aggressive fan curve profile (lower temps, louder noise)
• uses nvidia-settings commands
• automatically enables GPU fan control (but not CoolBits)
• easy to read code, with plentiful comments (beginner friendly)
• "intelligently" adjusts the time between tempurature readings
• very lightweight; see stats section for more info
• easy-to-use update script that uses git

Prerequisites

• Bash version 4 and above, or a bash-like shell with the same commands
• Nvidia GLX Driver version greater than 304
• Update script requires git (it'll check for it when it's run)

How to install

GitHub

• Download the .zip file straight from the GitHubs
• Extract it somewhere, and open a terminal to that directory
• Make sure CoolBits is enabled
• Run ./temp.sh for a foreground process, or ./update.sh for a background* one
• Check USAGE.md for instructions on how to start the script on boot and on how to enable CoolBits

git

• Choose a folder you want to download/install the script in
• git clone https://github.com/nan0s7/nfancurve
• See instructions for GitHub for the rest

Stats

• v4 over 4.5h up-time: 0:03.88 CPU time
• v7 around 5h: 0:03.22 CPU time
• v10 around 5h: 0:02.42 CPU time

I ended up catching the command I use to get the current temperature in action and these are the stats: 0:00.06 CPU time. I will say this is again quite inaccurate at this scale, and on other times I've caught the command I've seen the statistics vary by a small bit. My current CPU for measuring these stats is an i7 6700K @ 4.5GHz.

TODO:

• add more error checking when getting the current GPU temperature
• weird unary error on some computers
• re-write if statements as for loops
• make sure that "CoolBits" is enabled - not really the scope of this script
• possibly check the currently installed driver version - earlier versions used the GPUCurrentFanSpeed command
• improve fan curve logic (ie 100%)
• make code more modular / more easily customisable
• add in a really detailed guide of how the script works
• add nouveau support (once they fix Pascal)

*or just execute this command: nohup ./temp.sh >/dev/null 2>&1 &