Back in 2007 I built myself a gaming PC with two brand new GTX 8800 cards (SLI, baby!) and nearly cooked/choked them to death in first week of operation. What I learned back then was that nVidia drivers did not create a proper fan curve that would ramp up with rising temperatures and that I needed a piece of 3rd party software named Afterburner to keep my system cooled.
It's been nearly 20 years and probably a dozen different graphic card models since then. I have just finished installing a render box for my wife with a 3090 in it. Installed the drivers. Installed the Afterburner. Tuned it.
Then it dawned on me: Is this still a necessary step? What would happen if I did not install Afterburner? Don't nVidia drivers control the fans properly?
Logic dictates it would be crazy for the official drivers not to keep the card cool, but I've been doing it one way for so long that I am too afraid to experiment (risking hardware damage?).
When you're afraid to let evidence lead you, next best thing is surely asking strangers on the internet - so here it goes: Is MSI Afterburner necessary? What would happen if I don't install it? Do YOU have it installed?
I just built a new gaming pc with a 4080 super and 7800x3d in the lian li dan a4 h2o case and while the base fan curve is fine i adjusted the curves in afterburner and knocked an additional 10c off the temps. The thing with this case is that airflow is only coming from the gpu fans and aio radiator fans so if one isnt hitting temps to get the fans going, the airflow is going to suffer. I found this neat little program that actually allows it to control both fans based on the higher temp between the gpu and cpu, takes a little bit of understanding how to set it up but its indispensable for small form factor cases like mine. https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases
Fan Control is great. Like you mentioned, the possibility to create mix fan curves is really helpful. For example, if either CPU or GPU gets hot, you can set all the case fans to ramp up. There are good guide videos on YouTube that shows how to set it up.
I'm also using FanControl and I think it's great.
My case fans ramp up based on my GPU temperature.
The only issue I have with it is it needed an AMD plugin to work with my GPU, no biggie. But the AMD drivers seems to fight FanControl over the GPU fan speed. I may have done something wrong but they seemed to affect eachother. So now I control my GPU fans from the AMD drivers and the rest of my fans from FanControl.
Don't forget to backup your config file somewhere. I'd hate to lose my config.