[Bug] RTX 3070 Laptop GPU — intermittent fan ramp-up during light desktop usage
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 43/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Active
- Tech stack
- macos, rust
- Domain
- performance
Research direction
Start by reading the project’s GPU power-state and fan-management code for Ampere laptop GPUs; the issue does not identify files or tests. Check whether light desktop workloads leave the GPU in a high power state, and use the reported 30–60 second fan ramp during Safari browsing as the behavior to investigate and reproduce.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Send logs report ID
Not available — The Log Collector gets stuck while collecting logs, so I couldn’t obtain a Report ID.
Where does it go wrong?
During light desktop usage, such as browsing in Safari, the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU fans randomly ramp up for approximately 30–60 seconds before returning to normal. This happens even when no demanding applications are running. The fans are generally quieter under similar workloads on Windows.
What happens
System information
- Laptop: Tongfang GM7TG7P
- CPU: Intel Core i7-11800H
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU (8 GB)
- macOS: Sequoia 15.8.1
- NVIDIA driver: 1.0.7
- SMBIOS: MacBookPro16,1 (previously MacBookPro16,3)
- Display: 2560×1440, 165 Hz
Issue description
During light desktop usage, such as browsing with Safari, the GPU fans occasionally ramp up noticeably, even when no demanding applications are running.
The fans typically remain at a higher speed for approximately 30–60 seconds before returning to normal.
On Windows, the GPU fans generally remain quieter under similar light workloads.
This behavior was also present with my previous MacBookPro16,3 SMBIOS configuration.
Expected behavior
The GPU fans should remain relatively quiet during light desktop usage unless additional cooling is necessary.
Questions
- Could this behavior be related to GPU power-state (P-state) management?
- Is GPU power management currently implemented for Ampere laptop GPUs?
- Are there any planned improvements to idle GPU power management?
Thank you for your work on this driver!
App or game (if it is one)
No response
Did you change anything yourself?
No response
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 2.5k
- Forks
- 233
- Avg merge
- 1h 37m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 1
Getting set up
This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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