Case Fan Control

SpellowHouse

SpellowHouse

SpellowHouse

Soldato
Joined
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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?
 
I use loop temperature, as component temperatures vary rapidly, which can cause the fans to repeatedly ramp up and down and it gets annoying.
I use Aquacomputer kit, so set fan curves in Aquasuite - You can choose any sensor in the system to base the temp curves upon, or you can just keep everything at a set speed, or you can set it to just keep everything below a particular temperature... It's a pretty comprehensive package.

For air-cooled PCs, there are several different softwares like FanControl which provide similar settings but without needing specific kit.
 
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)
 
Meddling-Monk said:
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)
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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.
 
There’s free software called Fan Cantrol and it’s amazing. There will be no better solution, I promise :p

You press a button and it detects all fans in your system, working out the min / max speeds etc. It’ll even detect things like your motherboard VRM fan.

It then allows you to set your case fans to monitor CPU and your GPU together (!) - you set up two seperate curves and it then follows whichever is hotter:

Toasty CPU? Case fans increase.
Toasty GPU? Case fans increase.

You can even do the same sort of thing for your CPU if you want. You can control your GPU fans as well if needed.

I know it’s a sin to take a photo of a screen but this was taken before I potentially nuked my computer… and it’s what I have to post right now (on phone). You can see how I’ve set two curves for the intake fans and exhaust and then set them as ‘intake mix’ etc.

kscpnVh.jpeg


Just in case you are eagle-eyed: my front 3 intake fans are hooked up to a hub and use a single header attached to the motherboard. Neither my motherboard nor Fan Control can detect the live RPM of these fans. But this doesn’t really matter because you can still set the RPM % to suit.

Finally, you can also fine tune how long it takes for fans to ramp up and down (to avoid being sensitive to micro spikes) and also set delays to stop fans ramping down too quickly if there’s still toasty air in the case.

Overall, I think this software is amazing.

I hope this helps! :)
 
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My five case fans are connected to artic fan SATA powered hub then the master fan connector into chassis fan 1, so I can control all five fans from a single bios/os setting.

www.arctic.de

Case Fan Hub | 10 Port PWM Case Fan Hub with SATA Power | ARCTIC

You can place the Case Fan Hub anywhere in the case. It is connected to your motherboard with just one cable | Free shipping in Germany | Fast processing and delivery | ARCTIC Store
www.arctic.de www.arctic.de

With 10 ports I have five left, the case has space for a top fan, side intake as well. I've mounted a side mount fan to another motherboard header as that is 3 pin
 
Having checked Task Manager, Fan Control uses 33.5 MB of memory... which is pretty nominal. For reference, Chrome with this one OcUK tab is using just under 300 MB. Steam is close to 500 MB.

I originally wanted to use just the BIOS but the way Fan Control can be configured for your GPU as well is just a no-brainer to use IMO.

See here - have given a timestamp:

 
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First step is set the first “trigger” temperature at a reasonable value. For my CPU for example, 30% 65C, 35% 70C, 40% 75C and 70-100% 80C (some coolers won’t benefit from 100%, you need to find which point the performance is almost flat and only noise will increase). Setting the temperatures too low would cause the fans to change rpm constantly which is very perceptible and annoying.
Asus BIOS is okay, liked MSI more.
At the moment using the Aquacomputer quadro which allows me to change the settings if needed without using the awful Asus software. Also because the B650E-F still use mediocre 1A.
With the aquacomputer you can plan very elaborated settings, using offsets, delta, etc. For water cooling is even more fun, it for air still interesting.
I’m using sensors for intakes and exhaust, which can help setting realistic fan curves.
 
Littlenose said:
@Nitefly is it wrong of me to take a screenshot of your screen photo? ;)

Does the fancontrol software have much overhead on resources compared to BIOS control?
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If this is at all a concern for you, I would suggest some Aquacomputer kit - You use Aquasuite to configure it, but after that it runs by itself, no system resources needed beyond power supply. You can even run it outside the PC, if you wanted. I used one of their RGB controllers to run some LED light strips on the back of a TV before.
 
ttaskmaster said:
If this is at all a concern for you, I would suggest some Aquacomputer kit - You use Aquasuite to configure it, but after that it runs by itself, no system resources needed beyond power supply. You can even run it outside the PC, if you wanted. I used one of their RGB controllers to run some LED light strips on the back of a TV before.
Click to expand...

A few years back I tried some sort of fan control software and I remember losing about 5-10% frames while in DCS, so removed it.
I was just wondering if things were still the same.
I'll probably try it out at the weekend.
 
Deathjester said:
The subscription fee that they've started charging is frustrating tho.
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That's only for ongoing development, improvements and feature updates.
Every newly purchased Aquacomputer kit comes with a period of free updates. At the end of that period, whichever version of Aquasuite you got to will continue to work thereafter.
 
Deathjester said:
True, but all my kit is pretty old!
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The fundamentals haven't changed - You're likely only missing out on some combined/aggregate high-end stuff and some additional RGB patterns.
IIRC, the price is only about a tenner per year, which isn't much for software as seriously good as this, and from a very small company it's well worth the price.
 
I’ve always used BIOS to set fan curves, set it once and forget about it. Same with ARGB since windows 11 has dynamic lighting.

I despise bloatware.
 
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