ATI/AMD Crossfire fan noise

Question

I just got Ubuntu 11.10 64bit setup on my system that's a got a ATI Crossfire setup (I already installed the proprietary ATI drivers and Catalyst with no issues) however I don't seem to be able to control the second video cards fan speed that seems to be running at max (I have lm-sensors & fancontrol setup).

# aticonfig --pplib-cmd 'set fanspeed 1 31'
PPLIB command execution has failed!
ati_pplib_cmd: execute "set" failed!

Works just fine on the first card:

# aticonfig --pplib-cmd 'set fanspeed 0 31'
PPLIB command execution is Successful!

Both cards are being detected as you can see here:

CrossFire chain for adapter 0, status: enabled
  0. 0f:00.0 ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series
  1. 0e:00.0 ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series

Some help please.

Answer 1

Take a look at this AMD GPU Coolness page:

the assumption that aticonfig --pplib-cmd "set fanspeed 1 85" will set the fan on the second GPU is incorrect. This would set a - hypothetical second fan on the same GPU. Rather the selection of GPUs has to be done via the DISPLAY environment variable, where a display of :0.0 would refer to the first configured GPU, and :0.1 to the second and so on.

You may want to try the following to set the second display card fan speed:

DISPLAY=0.1 aticonfig --pplib-cmd 'set fanspeed 0 31'