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AMD Polaris RX570 Mojave fan control?

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Motherboard
GB Z77X-UD5H
CPU
i7 3770S
Graphics
ATI Radeon RX570
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. Apple
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hi all.

I'm searching for info on custom fan control and/or other performance-related parameters for the AMD/ATI Polaris series of cards e.g. RX5x0 or 4x0, but on the forum I was only able to find the guide for Vega series. My RX-570 card turns its fans on every 30 seconds for literally 2-3 seconds, doesn't quite observe hysteresis values. It's a bit annoying and i'm also worried about the fan bearings. I'd like to tweak the curves and ideally lower the frequencies and voltages as I don't use the card for anything heavy.

I'm able to flash a vbios to the card but then the windows driver hates it, and it seems the macOS kext is able to override much of that control anyway? The Vega thread suggests there's an "aty_properties" override(?), and I was wondering if anyone has achieved something similar on the Polaris architecture.

My system is Mojave, running WhateverGreen + Lilu, headless HD4000 for the h264 stuff, and the shiki boot args for Preview and DRM (Clover + FakeSMC). Happy to share more details if it would help.

Thanks in advance!
 
bump?

I decided to ignore Windows (which i simply don't use) and was able to override the clock speeds and i presume voltages so when the card is (supposed to be) idle, gl driver monitor shows 450MHz core clock. in fact this isn't the idle clock, but one or two levels above it. Not sure why macOS works it so much. I've also reduced the memory clock and was able to move one of my case fans to literally blow on the graphics card. Not ideal but at least the fan turns on much less often now.

If anyone has had more success with the Polaris RX series, I'd really appreciate hints/tips on what else to try. Thanks!
 
bump?

I decided to ignore Windows (which i simply don't use) and was able to override the clock speeds and i presume voltages so when the card is (supposed to be) idle, gl driver monitor shows 450MHz core clock. in fact this isn't the idle clock, but one or two levels above it. Not sure why macOS works it so much. I've also reduced the memory clock and was able to move one of my case fans to literally blow on the graphics card. Not ideal but at least the fan turns on much less often now.

If anyone has had more success with the Polaris RX series, I'd really appreciate hints/tips on what else to try. Thanks!

Hi there.

I probably can't help you but ...

What brand of RX570 is it you have these problems with?

My own Gigabyte and ASUS RX570's only span their fans very briefly at boot. After that, unless they were put under stress, didn't spin at all.

I did use the Windows utility to adjust the fan curves and reduce the threshold for fan start-up from 60 to 50-degrees. This setting was retained after reboot and so I wondered if these settings were held in the GPU's firmware or purely in the Windows driver. Unfortunately I found no way to test this is macOS - the Vega utility being unique to that card I believe (?).
 
What brand of RX570 is it you have these problems with?

it's an MSI Gaming 4GB model.
I'm a little surprised the graphics driver keeps it at the highest possible memory frequency, even when not doing much (though i was able to override the MHz in vbios). The windows driver change is recent (probably people used these cards too much for mining crypto).
 
it's an MSI Gaming 4GB model.
I'm a little surprised the graphics driver keeps it at the highest possible memory frequency, even when not doing much (though i was able to override the MHz in vbios). The windows driver change is recent (probably people used these cards too much for mining crypto).

Yes, as you pointed-put before, there's probably a signature check or CRC in the Windows driver so if you actually edit the VBIOS it would start flashing a red-light.

I've not used an MSI version of the RX570 but am surprised they would deviate from the norm. There was a time a few macOS versions ago when I did see the same periodic fan-spin-ups, but this was an early RX560. It hasn't occurred subsequently.

Sorry I couldn't shed more light.
 
You could inject PowerPlay tables using a kext similar to PolarisBoost.kext but instead of injecting a full blast always 100% clocks, you could do the opposite and inject a more relaxed configuration.
 
You could inject PowerPlay tables using a kext similar to PolarisBoost.kext but instead of injecting a full blast always 100% clocks, you could do the opposite and inject a more relaxed configuration.

yes, effectively I've lowered these same values by coding them into the VBios, and am aiming to do this on macOS boot instead. From what I could see, there's a PolarisBoost.kext and a wider RadeonBoost.kext that, in the 0x67DF1002 section (RX4xx/5xx-series) appears to do similar/same. So I have a direction to search in. Thank you for that.

"CFG,CFG_PTPL2_TBL", "CFG,CFG_NVV", "CFG,CFG_USE_CP2" all read a bit obscure to me. Is there a complete list of them anywhere? I googled but not very hard..
 
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