Hardware alternative to speedFan?

blash · 5 Jul 2015 at 04:07

I hope this is in the right sections, apologies if it isn't.

I have an older graphics card 6950 which was awfully noisy and so some time ago I removed the stock fans, cable tied two 120mm nf-f12 fans onto the heatsink, and by pluging into the motherboard headers and setting up a speed fan curve that uses the gpu temp info the set up worked really well, quiet with decent temperatures. At 70-100% fan speed the noctua fans are not quiet (I was gutted at the time since I found that my nf-p12 were quieter at those speeds) and so setting the fan curves were vital.

My problem is that I need to use linux for work, rather than finding a speedfan alternative I was wondering if there was any hardware fan control that uses the gpu temp sensor to change the fan speed? I've heard about the t-balancer, is this what I'm looking for?

zola25 · 5 Jul 2015 at 09:11

The only way to use hardware fan profiles that I can think of is if your motherboard also supports thermal probes. You could connect one to the GPU heatsink and use that to monitor/control the fan speed.

andy_mk3 · 5 Jul 2015 at 09:14

I believe there are adapters to let you plus in case fans onto a gpu, I'm sure I used something like that in the past. If you can do that, then you can use MSI afterburner for a custom fan profile on the gpu.

zola25 · 5 Jul 2015 at 10:46

I don't believe there's a version of afterburner for Linux.

Hotwired · 5 Jul 2015 at 10:53

I control a psu fan with a gpu simply by connecting the fan from the psu to the gpu header (reasons)

Nothing complicated about it but if the headers don't fit (full size 120mm case fan headers will not fit the usual 2 pin gpu headers) then you will need to bodge it or find an adapter.

You may have to consider how much power the gpu header is meant for but I doubt you'll be overloading it with 2 fans.

Telecaster · 7 Jul 2015 at 11:03

Not seen any recently, but you used to be able to get fans with a built in thermistor on a wire, you just put the thermistor end where you want to read the temp for the fan to react to, only issue is you're relying on the fan/thermistor being accurate enough and if it fails you have no way of knowing until something shuts down from overheating.