The goal of this post is to show you how to lower fan speed on a Dell Poweredge server after adding a 3rd party card.

Most Dell PowerEdge servers specially rack mounted versions usually don’t support GPUs so after trying and adding one as a test I was quick to discover that since it doesn’t recognize the card, iDRAC kicks up its fans in order to compensate for the possible extra heat generated by the new addition. As I discovered that the GPU performs to my satisfaction (even though not officially supported) I wanted to figure out a way to reduce the fan speeds back to the state prior to the addition but digging through iDRAC yielded no solution.

After some research, I discovered that IPMI commands can be issued to iDRAC in order to achieve the above but unfortunately this is not documented by DELL anywhere so I had to experiment first.

First run this command to see the status of the “3rd party card fan behavior” editing the IP and password to the one of your iDRAC:

ipmitool -H 192.168.139.8 -I lanplus -U root -P PASSWORD raw 0x30 0xce 0x01 0x16 0x05 0x00 0x00 0x00

The output should be:

16 05 00 00 00 05 00 00 00 00 (Enabled)

Now you may issue this command in order to disable it:

ipmitool -H 192.168.139.8 -I lanplus -U root -P PASSWORD raw 0x30 0xce 0x00 0x16 0x05 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x05 0x00 0x01 0x00 0x00

The output should now be:

16 05 00 00 00 05 00 01 00 00 (Disabled)

Your fans should spin down to a slower speed which in my case, is nearly silent (Dell R330).

Enjoy your new quiet server with a GPU!