On my old computer I used MSI Afterburner to create a curve for fan control on the GPU because, well, once somebody said that's the way to go. Now I have RTX 2080Ti and I just let the fans to be controlled automatically and everything appears to be working ok. That got me thinking, why was I using MSI Afterburner at all? What are the benefits of using such programs to control the fans on the GPU? I mean, if the temps raise high enough the fans are going to work at 100% by themselves and if there's no load you won't even hear them... so, what's the point, really?

Sometimes the default curves suck. For example, on my 3070, one of the fans will kick on and off constantly making a ticking noise, so I use a custom profile to turn it on at a lower temp. 

I prefer to keep my GPU from heating unnecessarily.  The default curves usually are optimized for minimal sound and come in too late for my tastes as the card starts to heat up.  Given that my machine is dedicated to simming, a little extra fan noise is quickly lost in the acft sounds playing through a 5.1 home theater system.

Many of the cards won't/can't run their PWM fans below ~40%, so you get that on/off cycling mentioned above.  That I do find distracting.  So setting custom curves can keep them turning at min speed even when the card isn't otherwise warm enough to need it.

 

here is a good example 

 

I'm glad I asked this question. Before I was pretty sure I don't need MSI Afterburner (or whatever program that does custom curves), now I know I need it. On of the things I was noticing lately was that after a while MSFS performance starts to degrade. I thought it's just another MSFS thing. When I looked at GPU temps I noticed that most of the time they were at 85°C (max) when running MSFS. Since the safe range is up to 88°C or so, I thought that's normal when under full load. But the card was not very loud, which I thought was actually great. So, now I installed MSI Afterburner, set up the curve and, oh man, I realized that my card was probably down-clocking all the time or something because if I even want to maintain 80°C the fans are loud as an airplane engine... but the performance in MSFS is way better now! I'm really negatively surprised that the card would rather degrade its performance than be loud. That's crazy.

Now I just have to get used to that jet engine sound of the fans. Man, that's loud.