nVidia 560ti - Noisy graphics card when flowers are near-by?

[Kruxxor]

I've been running FFXIV fine on 1680x1050, Most things at standard, texture and the second one in the same place on high. I can run the game with 4x AA or even 16x with shadows on High and my fan makes an acceptable amount of noise, but due to flowers I have reduced this in fear of my card burning out or over heating, so I have turned AA off but kept shadows on.

Now my fan is near silent whilst in towns, dungeons, running from place to place - Until I come across a place that has an amount of flowers, then the fan gradually builds up speeds and will not die down until I move away from them (Bit of a pain when levelling Botany)

Is there any way to disable these flowers? Or a setting I can use so that my graphics card doesn't go nuts whenever they're nearby?

I am running :
Windows 7 64-bit
8GB RAM
nVidia 560ti
Intel i5 2400 cpu

[Shokun]

I'm having a graphics card with same chip (MSI Hawk version) and on my card it was possible to undervolt the card slightly and modify the fan speed curve with MSI Afterburner. Basically the undervolting (from 1.050 to 1.000V) keeps the chip 5-10 degrees cooler without giving issues, and since the additional fan speed didn't bring large enough effect on keeping the chip cool I lowered the fan speed too, and the noise/temps stay on an acceptable level no matter the game settings. These are all very model-specific tweaks and can't recommend them on every card, nor guarantee that they work on any other card/model. Undervolting might introduce some issues like gfx becoming unstable, and lowering fan speed might increase the temps too much and fry the chip.

For game settings, I don't see any other choice but to bring them down to avoid this, as there's no way to turn the grass and trees off, I believe. For some reason, the trees make my card go hotter than with any benchmark/burn-in test I've found. :P The noise is not a bug that much I can assure, trees really do heat the gfx up a lot, at least 560 ti.

[Eekiki]

I had the same problem when I was using two GTX580s. Whenever there was a lot of ground foliage (and in all cutscenes), the GPU fans would just start screaming.

Setting all graphical settings to standard, turning off Anti-aliasing, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, and disabling cutscene effects helped a bit, but every now and then it still got to be too much.

Since upgrading to a single GTX670 (which believe it or not is significantly more powerful than the two 580's combined), this hasn't been a problem at all.

[Frein]

I have a GTX460 and it goes wild when outdoors, as well. I fixed the heat, and subsequent noise, issue by undervolting it from the default 0.925v to 0.825v, but I had to do a very slight underclock to keep the GPU stable. Peak temps dropped from ~83C to ~62C and I still get 60 FPS 95% of the time.

As Shokun pointed out, all cards behave differently, so you may get different results undervolting your card. I used MSI Afterburner to undervolt and underclock.