Anyone using Fujitsu-Siemens or Asus QFan Motherboards?

[Justin_R]

Has anyone out there purchased one of the Fujitsu-Siemens motherboards with motherboard-based fan regulation? You can read about them here. (Click on "premium features".)

How about the Asus motherboards with "QFan" technology? Has anyone used one of them?

It would be great to see a comparison of these two technologies/motherboard types from the silent computing perspective. The F-S boards seem really respected for their stability and to be seriously committed to acoustic management. The Asus boards seem generally more feature-rich (possibly allowing underclocking or undervolting, or memory tweaks), but QFan is a new thing for them, whereas F-S has apparently been doing its thing for a long while. The Asus boards seem a little less expensive and a lot easier to find, whereas the F-S boards are apparently available from only a few vendors (in the US, just Silicon Acoustics, Sharka Corp., and Ambient Computing, as far as I know).

So does anyone actually have any have any of these motherboards? Any comments on whether the fan-control technology is worthwhile or not? I kind of have the impression that while these features might be great for casual users who just want their computer a bit quieter, they don't really seem to be necessary for someone who could just use a bunch of 5V Panasonics instead.

[MikeC]

Can only comment on Q-fan on an Asus P4 mobo in a recently built system for a friend. Set in the BIOS, it lets the fan start at up to 1/3 less than normal voltage. Speed can be tied to the CPU temp read by the mobo. Couldn't get the latter going, response time was very slow, so opted for the former. 8v did make for a quieter fan, more convenient than messing with IDE connectors for 5 or 7V -- although this is no big deal.

I think the F-S mobo fan/thermal controls are more sophisticated, but those boards apparently don't have a lot of tweakable settings.