PWM Fans and an old Gigabyte Motherboard

[aeropars]

Hi all,

I've had my PC for years and it still does everything I need it to do. HOWEVER... there's been one problem which I've got a bee in my bonnet about which I would love to finally get to the bottom of.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H and I want to slow my fans down. Both the CPU and the case fans are all PWM capable however no matter what I do, I can't get them to slow down to make them quieter. I've set the bios settings to quiet as well as max but whatever setting i set, the fans spin at the same speed.

For reference the case fans are Asaka Apache Black's and the SPU cooler is an Asaka Venom Voodoo.

Speedfan reports they are all spinning at around 850 RPM and the CPU is running idle at around 40 degrees.

I appreciate this system is somewhat old but am I doing something wrong here?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

I have the same board. But 1.1. revision. Think there are three versions; 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2.

And I can tell you that at least one of the fan headers is really only a 3 pin header (but has a 4 pin connected), so that one will never be controllable other than through use of low noise adaptors (inline resistors) to reduce the voltage. As for the other ones, I haven't used PWM fans on them, but I can go grab one and give it a test a bit later on. Have lots of stuff on top of that PC at the moment so I need to clear it up first, but I would have expected that they would be controllable via PWM.

Incidentally, I have a fan from an Akasa Nero III (which is sort of the predecessor of your cooler). So I should be able to get some decent info once I get to it.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

Managed to get the fan working fine with PWM on the CPU fan header, but that one is tied to the CPU temps. But the PWM controls are too poor to get good control out of it.

The other fan headers (2 and 3) that PWM work on, are much harder to control, because they are tied to the motherboard temp, which often barely gets above 30C. Which is why it's always on one setting only nearly. From quick searching around, it's apparently something to do with badly designed BIOS control code for them that was never updated (F23b latest one I'm using).

Recommendation is for the non CPU fans to be put on specific voltages and using Low Noise Adaptors or other Inline Resistors to reduce speed and sound generated.

 

[aeropars]

Hi there. Many thanks for taking the time to do that.

So I’m not going mad! I was trying everything and couldn’t figure it out.

I’ll have a look into those noise reducers then. Many thanks for your help.