Case Fan Control

[SpellowHouse]

How do you control your case fans?

The reason I ask is that for years I have used iCUE. Very easy and just control the fans by the CPU temp. My PC is either idle or flat out gaming, so it's very simple. Essentially the fans are low most of the time then ramp up as soon as I start gaming.

But, I am losing confidence in iCUE would like to go back to controlling the fans with the BIOS. Thing is, I seem to remember that the BIOS control was not particularly responsive. What temperatures does the average BIOS monitor? What do you use?

 

[SpellowHouse]

Using an Aquacomputer Octo Fan controller on my main rig and a Quadro (also Aquacomputer) on the former secondary TV rig (may become a file server or something), they both use the Aquasuite software that ttaskmaster mentions. I personally like it because of the ability to control each fan in real time whilst logged into Windows - rather than be in BIOS Q-Fan control, so I can manually tune each fan by ear (and also not have them follow the onboard controller, which tends to be too aggressive), as well as select alternate temperature sources to modify fan speeds with (as well as being able to use probes to monitor areas of the case, and can make self adjusting curves depending on all the sensors, which is extra nice once you have time to fine tune it).

Was going for a second Octo for the newer rig, but a stock issue at OCUK left me without for now so forced to using the onboard fan headers using Q-Fan control on the motherboard - it has a selection of temperature sources for all the fans to react to, but I think it's been set to all fans to react to one source only (can't be certain, but I've left it on the CPU temp anyway as it's the most important one to consider). It's "fine", but as mentioned, you don't get to manually tune them in real time by testing loads whilst in Windows (which you can do with the Aquacomputer software), or tune fan curves after finding a better cooling/noise(speed required from fans) ratio depending on the load (to keep the system from getting too hot - or reaching 95C for the CPU and thermal throttling). Also, you can set small % differences for each fan (you can do this on the motherboard headers also, but the Octo has 8 individual channels to control 8 different fans), allowing you to prevent the fans from accidentally creating a beat frequency (I typically drop a 2-3% difference between each fan in the same location, so the three fans in front of the case could be set to 35%, 37% and 39% RPM for example, rather than 35% for all, etc)

Interesting.
One of the reasons I like iCUE is that is that I can mess with the fans in Windows. The problem is that Corsair just send out release after release of software with very fundamental bugs in it. In passing, I have no idea how their software people have survived so many years. I would have been fired by my company years ago if I sent out software this buggy.