NVIDIA Performance Control Panel (cont’d)
The GPU section is unique in that you can overclock not only the core and memory clocks, but now you can FINALLY access those shader clocks we’ve been told about for months! The GPU cooler fan is also controllable but even though there are places marked for GPU voltage control it isn’t offered quite yet.
Here is another example of a rule you might want to setup: as the GPU temperature increases you can increase the GPU fan speed. This would have been nice with that first round of 8800 GT cards that had some fan troubles.
The power supply section in the Performance menu is really a read-only screen. Here you can see the current and wattage use on the various rails of our Tagan power supply.
The Cosmos 1000 case allows control of the intake and exhaust fans on the system and again you have the ability to set rues based on the chassis temperature, for example.
The water cooler is the last informational section on the Performance section and the option you can set here is the target coolant temperature. Basically, this is the temperature you’d like the water running through the system to be. The lower the temp, the more the fan is going to have to work to cool the radiator and fluid.
Even though it’s not accessible in the main menu, using the rule creation wizard you can indeed control the fan speed based on the water cooler temperature to your desired level.
Again, the Performance section of NVIDIA’s new control panel is impressive, with just a few nagging issues that should be addressed. First, it’s not readily apparent that you are creating a Profile when you are making all these settings and changes. The main tab this is all under does say “Create Profiles” but where is the save button? Or the naming field? Turns out that exists in the main menu along the top bar under Profile, Save. Makes sense now but didn’t when I was hunting for it.
The rule creation is nice and think this will give power users a lot of ability to really tune their system to their liking, but I think maybe having some default, built-in rules from the manufacturers makes some sense too; basically like presets that users can modify if they wish.
