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BIOS & FAN CONTROL
Normally in this section we would provide some pictures of the BIOS, but in
this case we felt it was unnecessary. The only selectable options of note were
memory clock (400/533/667/800), command rate (1T/2T), and UMA frame buffer size
(AUTO/32MB/64MB/128MB/256MB/512MB/1024MB), i.e. the amount of memory allocated
to the integrated graphics. There was also a Frequency/Voltage Control section
with only two options: NPT Fid and NPT Vid control - both of which were grayed
out and thus out of reach. Fan control is provided by the Smart Fan Control
option (Enabled/Disabled) available in the Hardware Monitor section.
The KI690 has two fan headers, one 4-pin PWM connector intended for the CPU
fan and one 3-pin connector. Unfortunately the stock heatsink that came with
our test processor, the X2 3800+, was of the 3-pin variety and could not be
controlled with 4-pin header. We plugged in a 4-pin fan from an Intel LGA775
stock heatsink to see how well (or if at all) Smart Fan worked. The fan ran
at approximately 2140RPM before we began stress testing. After a few minutes
we did not notice the fan speed changing and assumed the fan control feature
was broken or faulty. It dawned on us that perhaps the CPU was not heating up
enough for the fan control to kick in, so we turned off the AMD stock fan. Once
the core temperature exceeded 50C and Smart Fan increased the fan speed to about
2550RPM sporadically, that is the speed would ramp up with little rhyme or reason
beyond this point. Not content, we installed the latest version of SpeedFan.
RPM reporting in the BIOS was accurate however SpeedFan seemed to have some
difficulties. No reading was displayed for the 3-pin header and an erroneous
reading was attributed to the 4-pin fan. While the LGA775 stock fan is loud,
1,350,000RPM is somewhat of an exaggeration.
We located the PWM settings in the Advanced menu. "PWM 1 mode" corresponds
to the 4-pin PWM fan connector. Changing this option to "Software controlled"
allowed us to customize the fan's speed, however we found the minimum and maximum
speeds to be exactly the same as Smart Fan (minimum being approximately 70%).
The other PWM settings did not do anything as far as we could tell. The 3-pin
header was not controllable with SpeedFan or Smart Fan.
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