Quite some time ago I made a post about the coolbits option as a way to be able to control nvidia cards fan speed manually on Ubuntu. Things are a little bit different on Arch Linux. For starters xorg.conf has been somewhat deprecated and it’s preferable to make a file such as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf with just the bit of information we want to change. We’ll edit/create that file and add something like:

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Section "Device"
        Identifier "Nvidia Card"
        Driver "nvidia"
        VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
        Option "NoLogo" "true"
        Option "Coolbits" "4"
EndSection

The speed itself can still be configured through the nvidia-settings application under Thermal Settings. Keep in mind you’ll need nvidia’s proprietary driver for this to work and not the open source nouveau driver.

More info on how to configure other aspects of the driver may be found here at Arch’s Wiki.