My XFX Radeon R9 390 is a 275W Volcanic Islands card that has seen better days. It still meets my requirements, but I noticed the GPU fans failed to start until 70°C. The fan curve by this temperature was set to 4400 RPM. Diagnostics revealed a known XFX fan controller fault: the tachometer signal on the failed side was stuck reporting 3000 RPM despite the fan spinning at 5000+ RPM under manual PWM control. I ordered replacement fans from AliExpress to avoid the wait times for XFX support.
Opening the card voids the warranty, though mine had already expired. I took the opportunity to clean the heatsink fins and replace the thermal paste.
I reattached the new fans with the original screws, securing the cables to the heatsink with zip ties. Once the headers were connected to the controller, I reseated the shroud and verified the fans were ramping up correctly based on the GPU core temperature.
After replacing the fans my idle fan spin issue was fixed, but was still sitting at half the 3000 RPM, but once reaching higher RPM it matched software. I don’t mind this as I tend to lower RPM for noise. Replacing the fans reduced idle temperatures to around 34°C and lowered power consumption. Before the fan had been fixed the idle was between 40-50°C and was extremely loud. The card is significantly quieter now. Not long after, I acquired an RX 6660 XT, allowing the R9 390 to be repurposed in a secondary machine for a home-server, rather than being scrapped.
