Fan controllers a good idea?

[DannyB]

Hello,

Apologies if this a daft question - I'm still quite new to having anything fancier than a cheap case with cheap noisy fans. I've picked up a nice new CoolerMaster case over the weekend, which comes with 3 chassis fans. It's great - it runs very quietly and I'm generally quite pleased with it.

I'm using SpeedFan and have reduced the fans (chassis and CPU) to around 40-50% of their normal speed until the temperature rises above 40 degrees. However, my motherboard only has attachments for two chassis fans and the CPU fan, so I'm assuming the one remaining fan (powered via molex) is going to be constantly running at full speed.

If I purchased one of those shiny front bay fan controllers to control all the fans in the case, how could I keep an eye on specific temperatures like that of the CPU? I realise many fan controllers come with their own temperature sensors, but surely that can't give an accurate reading of the chip? Or would I just attach the CPU fan to the motherboard as normal and only control the chassis fans using the controller, working on the internal ambient temperature, rather than the temperatures of specific components?

I guess what I'm asking is this: is it possible for a fan controller to use existing temperature sensors already built into components but still control fan speeds through hardware, rather than software like SpeedFan? Again - sorry if that's a daft question, but this really is new to me.

Thanks a bunch for your time.

 

[mattyj1085]

I guess what I'm asking is this: is it possible for a fan controller to use existing temperature sensors already built into components but still control fan speeds through hardware, rather than software like SpeedFan? Again - sorry if that's a daft question, but this really is new to me.

no fan controllers use the built in sensors of the chips to adjust speeds like speenfan. Well none that I know of and if they did I suspect they wouldn't be cheap!

most just allow you to manually control the fans, some come with there own thermal probes but as you say its hard to get accurate readings from them if they are not placed directly on the components, personally I just use a basic 4 fan controller with 4 knobs that I have all set on lowest until I start playing a game or encoding or something that’s going to put the load on the components up therefore increase the temps, I then I turn the fans up a bit to compensate.

Just use something like realtemp to monitor the CPU temps from time to time to make sure everything is performing as you would expect.