Long road to silence

About 2 months ago, I wrote the article about upgrading my CPU to 5800XT. But it had a hidden problem that I completely forgot about – it is quite loud under heavy load. Even when only a single core is loaded, the CPU will boost quite a bit, and this increases its temperature by quite a lot. This in turn will increases fan(s) speed, and the stock CPU fan is definitely not the quietest.

Obviously, the easiest solution would be to upgrade the CPU cooler. Recently, I used the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 EVO CPU Cooler in 2 of my builds with 9900X and 9800X3D CPUs, and it works very well in both cases. The only bad side is that the instructions are quite bad, but it is easy to find a video that explains the process.

But buying a new CPU cooler would be too simple, and I was not looking for an easy solution. After some thought, I recognized that typically, my work fits into one of the 2 categories: light load or quite heavy load.

During my typical load, I don’t need any special power from my computer. For example, I’m doing working on relatively small C# project. Or I’m doing some research, playing light games, browsing, reading, watching a video, typing this article, or doing something similar. Typically, in this case, I want the computer to be quiet. But more importantly I want to save power and reduce the heat coming from the computer.

The second category is heavy workload. I’m compiling a lot of code, and it takes tens of seconds, or profiling our application and it can take minutes. Obviously in this case I want tasks to be finished as soon as possible. In this case, I want all the CPU power I have.

As a result, decided to create a silent profile in the Power Options section of the Control Panel. The key here is to go to the “Advanced Options” of that profile and set the Maximum process state to 99%. This way, any kind of CPU boost will be disabled, and the processor will always stay on its Base clock. In my case, it will stay at or below 3.8 GHz, while normally it can go up to 4.8 GHz. Update from Jun 4th 2026: The better way is explained here.

This way, most of the day I spent in the “Silent” mode, but if I need performance, I switch to the “Balanced” mode. According to AI and general logic, in this mode, the 5800XT consumes even less power than my previous CPU, the 2600X. And even though this profile is silent, it is still much faster than my old CPU. In my tests, I was losing around 15-20% of performance, compared to full power. So, I can do heavy tasks in the silent mode as well; they will take just a bit longer.

Here are numbers. For a full rebuild of the solution that has C# and C++ projects takes around 1:28 minutes to compile in normal mode and 1:41 in silent mode. This task is using all cores. For an application that uses only a single core, it takes 1:54 to compile a huge project in normal mode and 2:20 in the silent profile.

As you can see, it is slower but not critical. This is an extreme case when I need to rebuild everything. Normally, the difference is way less. Plus, in this mode it consumes around 40% of its normal power.

But the computer is still not completely silent in the “Silent” mode. This happened because the fan curve in this BIOS (UEFI) is not optimal. Default settings are trying to keep the CPU quite cold and as a result, fans work at relatively high speed.

But the hotter the CPU, the bigger difference between air and the CPU and better the thermal transfer. As a result, I prefer to keep the CPU hotter and run fans slower. It is easy to set fan curves in BIOS (UEFI), but I don’t know at what RPMs each fan is quiet. I have 3 different case fans in this case, plus the CPU fan, the power supply fan, and the video card also has a fan. It is hard to distinguish one fan from the another.

With the help of AI, I found the Fan Control application that allows me to directly control each fan. Then it was quite simple. Firstly, I shut down all, and I mean all, applications except Fan Control. Then in Fan Control I switched off all the fans I could. Don’t worry, when there is no load, the heatsink on the CPU can dissipate all heat for quite some time. Likely, my video card typically doesn’t spit its fan.

In my case, all of fans stopped except for the power supply fan. This would be level zero. Then I start each fan one by one. I will check the opened case and watch which one will start, and to which connector it is connected to the motherboard. Then I slowly ramp up its speed until I can start hearing it. Then dial its speed slightly down. I wrote that number down on a piece of paper. This will be the quiet speed for this fan. Then I switch off this fan.

When I had all numbers, I went to BIOS and set this quiet speed for the point that corresponds to 60 °C.  At 85 °C, I put 100% and then fill all points in between. Then I ran some tests to make sure it works as intended and did some minor adjustments. Technically, Fan Control can also control fans, but the fewer applications Windows is running, the better.

After that I have very quiet system, but in performance mode I have an issue when I have intermittent loads. In this case fans ramp up very quickly and then very quickly slowdown.  There is typically a setting in BIOS on how fast the fan will ramp up speed and how fast it will slow down. It put the maximum allowed value of 1 second to avoid annoying sudden jet sounds and then silence a quarter second later. This way, fans will increase slowly and decrease slowly too. I found it is much more pleasant to my ears.

At the end, I got a quiet system that consumes very little power but still performs quite well. But if I need peformance, I can always switch to the “turbo mode” to get every bit of performance. It will be fast but loud.

I hope it helps someone.