Hydro 110i Hit 40C - Fan Curve Opinions?

I've had a good experience with the H115i so far but I finally have a game that is putting me at 40C for the water temp (Assassin's Creed: Odyssey).

I figured AC:O was going to be my most demanding game and I'm getting a good amount of GPU waste heat in my case which is unavoidable. With it being Summer and my Windows idle around 31C, 40C is not unexpected when running an intensive game.

With that said, it's a little disconcerting to hear the fans go full speed at 40C and I've never had to experience that before.

To my question, are custom fan curves ideal in this situation and what is recommended? I tend to prefer a constant noise level and I'm comfortable with the fans going at 1200RPM. Would it be safe or ideal to have them run at 1200RPM up to 50C and then have them go to say 70 or 80%?

I'm wondering if 1200RPM will be enough to cool it at 40C. I would hope that I would never reach 50C or even 45 and if I heard the fans ramp, I'd then know I have a problem.

Thoughts?

If airflow through the radiator was the only factor, the difference between 1200 rpm and 1500 rpm would be about 1C on 280mm radiator. The difficult variables to account for are the local case ambient temperature in that part of the case and the effect of the air temperature moving through the radiator. Both have a strong effect on radiator performance and coolant temperature.

Odyssey is a bit of pain because it has both large GPU load and some baffling high cycle CPU loads, even on 6+ core CPUs. You are correct and +9C is not a very large increase for a combo CPU/GPU load with a definite case temp factor. You can either cap the fans at a fixed rate (1200 rpm) or set your curve that way with a high spike around 50C. That will give you an auditory warning if things get out of control. In this instance, fan speed really isn't the controlling variable and unless you turn them off or limit them to something really slow like 300 rpm, you can't overheat the CPU by limiting the fans. Most of your CPU heat is going to be voltage based and +-200 rpm on the fans makes no meaningful difference to end temperature, right until you are against your maximum CPU temp limit.

That seemed to work. Coolant temp stayed at 39-40C with a fixed 1200RPM.

I'll try to do a long play session this weekend to see what the temp tops out at.

Thanks again.