Fan Control
Wednesday 27th July, 2022 11:29 Comments: 1
I decided to abandon the vendor software I was using to control the fan speed on my main computer's motherboard (for multiple reasons), and give Fan Control a try instead. I was happy enough with the GPU fan settings, even though that software seemed even more clunky, but being able to control everything in one place sounded nice.
It's free software, unlike at least one of its main competitors. It can also launch on start-up to load and deploy a configuration automatically (the software I'd previously used needed me to launch the GUI and manually load the profile). It also does a good job of holding your hand to begin with (checking for and installing an updated version of the software, and detecting and matching the fans and their controls). The interface wasn't entirely intuitive at first, but you will get used to it after a bit of playing.
The slight downside to this software for me is it didn't work out how to control System Fan #6, which was connected to my intake fan, so I ended up taking off the sides of my case and moving the header to System Fan #2 on the motherboard so I could control the fan. I'm not sure why it had issues with controlling some of the system fans, when the original vendor software seemed capable of doing this.
The main thing I like about Fan Control is how I can create a "Mix" fan curve. Instead of configuring a fan to speed up or slow down with a custom fan curve based on the setting of a single component, you can do even more complex things. For example, you can configure two custom fan curves for components like the motherboard's PCH and your GPU. Then you can add both custom fan curves to the "Mix". You can add more than two curves if you really want to, and you can even choose how you want it to mix the curves. I'm using the maximum, but you can use the minimum value (not too sure why that exists, but maybe it's useful for someone?) or an average of the two curves (which I'd consider using). There's also slightly weird sum and subtract options, the latter I'm guessing you can mix in with an inverted fan curve or something like that?
It's also exposed the two fan controls on my GPU (the three fans are apparently wired as a pair of fans near the HDMI ports, and a single fan back near the 8-PIN connector). In theory I could use different curves for the fans, but I suspect that might not be a great idea when the card is hot. One option I considered was having just one GPU fan running to help keep the entire card cool when it's mostly idle (when entirely idle the fans should turn off if there's sufficient airflow in the case), but that also might wear out one fan faster than the others. I figure it's easier to let all 3 fans spin up once the card gets too hot for my liking, specially when the fans are pretty quiet to begin with.
I haven't added it yet, but there's also a sensor for the NVMe stick, which is one of the hottest components in my system when everything's idle. In theory I could add that to a "Mix" fan curve at some point, to increase airflow in the case if it ever gets too hot. Similarly, I could add the motherboard's VRM temperature into a mix. At some point I'll probably uninstall the clunky vendor software for the GPU and motherboard, and rely on one piece of software for controlling the colours on my RGB hardware (they're either off or blue) and Fan Control for all the fan speeds.
For people that love to tinker with fan curves in an attempt to keep their system quiet when idle but cool enough when pushing their system hard, this seems like quite a nice piece of software. I would recommend you know what you're doing though, as letting components get too hot could result in them dying (and if it records the maximum temperature, such as an NVMe stick, you may find it invalidates your warranty), or at the very least thermal throttling and reducing performance under load.
It's free software, unlike at least one of its main competitors. It can also launch on start-up to load and deploy a configuration automatically (the software I'd previously used needed me to launch the GUI and manually load the profile). It also does a good job of holding your hand to begin with (checking for and installing an updated version of the software, and detecting and matching the fans and their controls). The interface wasn't entirely intuitive at first, but you will get used to it after a bit of playing.
The slight downside to this software for me is it didn't work out how to control System Fan #6, which was connected to my intake fan, so I ended up taking off the sides of my case and moving the header to System Fan #2 on the motherboard so I could control the fan. I'm not sure why it had issues with controlling some of the system fans, when the original vendor software seemed capable of doing this.
The main thing I like about Fan Control is how I can create a "Mix" fan curve. Instead of configuring a fan to speed up or slow down with a custom fan curve based on the setting of a single component, you can do even more complex things. For example, you can configure two custom fan curves for components like the motherboard's PCH and your GPU. Then you can add both custom fan curves to the "Mix". You can add more than two curves if you really want to, and you can even choose how you want it to mix the curves. I'm using the maximum, but you can use the minimum value (not too sure why that exists, but maybe it's useful for someone?) or an average of the two curves (which I'd consider using). There's also slightly weird sum and subtract options, the latter I'm guessing you can mix in with an inverted fan curve or something like that?
It's also exposed the two fan controls on my GPU (the three fans are apparently wired as a pair of fans near the HDMI ports, and a single fan back near the 8-PIN connector). In theory I could use different curves for the fans, but I suspect that might not be a great idea when the card is hot. One option I considered was having just one GPU fan running to help keep the entire card cool when it's mostly idle (when entirely idle the fans should turn off if there's sufficient airflow in the case), but that also might wear out one fan faster than the others. I figure it's easier to let all 3 fans spin up once the card gets too hot for my liking, specially when the fans are pretty quiet to begin with.
I haven't added it yet, but there's also a sensor for the NVMe stick, which is one of the hottest components in my system when everything's idle. In theory I could add that to a "Mix" fan curve at some point, to increase airflow in the case if it ever gets too hot. Similarly, I could add the motherboard's VRM temperature into a mix. At some point I'll probably uninstall the clunky vendor software for the GPU and motherboard, and rely on one piece of software for controlling the colours on my RGB hardware (they're either off or blue) and Fan Control for all the fan speeds.
For people that love to tinker with fan curves in an attempt to keep their system quiet when idle but cool enough when pushing their system hard, this seems like quite a nice piece of software. I would recommend you know what you're doing though, as letting components get too hot could result in them dying (and if it records the maximum temperature, such as an NVMe stick, you may find it invalidates your warranty), or at the very least thermal throttling and reducing performance under load.
Robert - Sunday 18th September, 2022 12:33 The software is a bit buggy. I was gaming the other night and the graphics card fans weren't doing what I'd configured and the GPU got very hot (there's enough airflow that it should thermal throttle the GPU before anything serious happens). I think I've made it happy again. My suspicion is because I'd set the fan start/stop speed to 30% it tried setting it to 30% and the GPU ignored it (an NVIDIA limitation on both my Gigabyte RTX cards) so it thought something else was controlling the fans and gave up completely. After changing to 31% it seems much happier. To be fair to the software, when automatically calibrated it does try to set higher start/stop values.