SPCR

Hi all.

Does anybody know anything about fan control of Asus H87I-PLUS motherboard, using Linux? I would like slow down a little bit the CPU fan, to have a quieter pc; but I have no hardware monitoring interface under /sys filesystem, as I had on a previous Asus motherboard. I tried with the 3.13 kernel of the latest Ubuntu 14.04.

Any suggestions?

thank you in advance for any hint.

Ciao

Does lm-sensors work for you? Fancontrol is part of lm-sensors so is that what you were using in the past or something else?

Typically Asus motherboards including the H87I-PLUS allow a fairly quiet PWM CPU fan by using the BIOS settings, which are independent of the OS. It might be worth checking that Q-Fan Control is enabled, and that the Silent CPU Fan Profile is selected. This will allow the CPU fan to run from around 20% PWM duty cycle, and hold this speed until the CPU temperature hits around 40C (actual speeds depend on the fan concerned). If the PWM CPU fan is capable of dropping its speed to the 300 to 400 rpm band it may be necessary to adjust the BIOS CPU Fan Speed Low Limit, normally it is easier to set this to Ignore.

lm-sensors runs its tests, but no success. Maybe there's still no support in the kernel for the hardware monitoring device. How can I know the manufacturer/model of the device?

The quietest settings in the bios are not enough, I keep the pc on the desk and I can hear the fan noise. The CPU temperature is actually 40C, I would like to try to keep it at 50C when idle and check the noise level.

Thank you for you answers!

Are you running the Intel stock heatsink? Can you monitor the relevant speed?

Try to load the nct6775 module and then run sensors. If it shows values, you are having a recent enough version of nct6775, if not, then :
https://github.com/groeck/nct6775

Of course then you can then use the good old pwmconfig & fancontrol to control the fans.

Personally i found many of ASUS & ASRock boards use this Super I/O chip (or it's variants, supported by same module), so it is worth a try.

quest_for_silence,
yes, I'm running the stock fan and heatsink. I cannot read its speed because I'm missing the hardware monitor driver (if it currently exists).


faugusztin,
I've just compiled the nct6775 driver, but loading it (modprobe) I get a 'no such device' error. Damn.
I'm running kernel 3.10, and I'm going to upgrade to 3.14 soon, I'll try again.
Thank you for your advice.

pan3 wrote:quest_for_silence,
yes, I'm running the stock fan and heatsink. I cannot read its speed because I'm missing the hardware monitor driver (if it currently exists).

Well, you don't need to boot into Linux, you can check it even into the BIOS/UEFI monitoring page: first of all I just want to understand whether or not you can't stand the minimun fan speed the Intel stock heatsink is capable of (as in that case you have just to swap the heatsink itself).

Ah, ok... I didn't think about rebooting. Yes, fan speed is definitely shown by bios interface

I'll plan a reboot as soon as possible, this is 24x7 powered-up machine. I'll let you know.

pan3 wrote:Ah, ok... I didn't think about rebooting. Yes, fan speed is definitely shown by bios interface

I'll plan a reboot as soon as possible, this is 24x7 powered-up machine. I'll let you know.

Once you will reboot, don't pick up any pre-set profile: set it manually at the lowest speed possible.

pan3 wrote:I've just compiled the nct6775 driver, but loading it (modprobe) I get a 'no such device' error. Damn.

Ok, one more thing to try just out of top of my hat - try loading asus_atk0110 module.

But the fact that nct6775 is not working for you is weird, because as you can see on the image it uses nuvoton NCT5538D (near the back panel, behind the optical output connector). And according to this mail it is exactly the nct6775 module which works for that chip.

pan3 wrote:quest_for_silence,
yes, I'm running the stock fan and heatsink. I cannot read its speed because I'm missing the hardware monitor driver (if it currently exists).


faugusztin,
I've just compiled the nct6775 driver, but loading it (modprobe) I get a 'no such device' error. Damn.
I'm running kernel 3.10, and I'm going to upgrade to 3.14 soon, I'll try again.
Thank you for your advice.

I also have this motherboard and am running Ubuntu 12.04.4 with the 3.11 kernel.
I tried loading the nct6775 driver but got the same 'no such device' error.
I then tried building the latest driver from the github repo and that worked!

[943447.356416] nct6775: Enabling hardware monitor logical device mappings.
[943447.356435] nct6775: Found NCT6791D or compatible chip at 0x2e:0x290

Thank you!

I upgraded to kernel 3.14.4, and now the driver nct6775 works! I'm happy.
Now I can read fan speed and manually set their speed. This driver also has some fan control modes, I'll play with them.
There are 15 voltage sensors, at a glance I didn't figure out which ones are the CPU voltages.

faugusztin, thank you for "physically check" that nct6775 is the correct driver.
d98jh, thank you for testing the newest driver.

Thank you all for your support!

Ciao

mmmmh...

I can't set cpu fan speed below 1000 rpm, no matter what duty cycle I set (in manual mode).
I disabled all Q-FAN controls in BIOS settings.

As far as you know, there are motherboards with hard-lower fan speed limits?

pan3 wrote:I can't set cpu fan speed below 1000 rpm, no matter what duty cycle I set (in manual mode).

It should be the minimun fan speed the Intel stock heatsink is capable of: whether you can't stand the relevant noise, I guess you have just to swap the heatsink (or do a ghetto mod to swap the fan).

I have an older Asus M4A and run Linux (openSUSE). I found that in order to get pwmconfig/lm-sensors to work, I had to add this to the kernel boot:

acpi_enforce_resources=lax

pan3 wrote:I can't set cpu fan speed below 1000 rpm, no matter what duty cycle I set (in manual mode).

With your motherboard enabling Q-Fan Control and setting the CPU Fan Profile to Silent will, as already said, result in the fan being sent a 20% or so PWM duty cycle control signal while the CPU temp remains under 40C. However PWM fans have a profile; that is typically any control signal setting between 0 and 30% results in the same or a similar speed. The reason partly is to avoid a manual 0% setting turning the fan off. It's also to give a constant speed during idle conditions when variations in fan speed are more noticeable. The figures below for the Glide Stream PWM fan fitted to the Scythe Kotetsu CPU cooler (from the SPCR review) illustrate this point.

There's some hard low-limit for the CPU-FAN connector. Plugging the chassis fan into it (a standard 8cm fan) it runs quite fast (and noisily) even setting pwm to 0.
Conversely, plugging the cpu fan into the CHASSIS-FAN connector I can go below 1000rpm: 700rpm with pwm at 80/255. Lowering further the pwm the fan stops.

At the end of the day, the Intel fan at 1000rpm is almost noiseless. I would like a lower speed, but I can bear with it.
Now I know that most of the noise comes from the PSU fan... A bad purchase.

Thank you!

pan3 wrote:There's some hard low-limit for the CPU-FAN connector. Plugging the chassis fan into it (a standard 8cm fan) it runs quite fast (and noisily) even setting pwm to 0.
Conversely, plugging the cpu fan into the CHASSIS-FAN connector I can go below 1000rpm: 700rpm with pwm at 80/255. Lowering further the pwm the fan stops.

It's just how those fans work: roughly simplifying, in a PWM design the fan is switched on and off accordingly to the duty cycle of a modulator signal through the fourth wire: a bit more precisely, the average value of voltage supplied to the fan is controlled by turning the switch on and off at a fast pace, so that the longer the switch is on (with reference to the off time), the higher is the average voltage supplied to it, and therefore the faster the fan spins.
So, where that fourth wire does not exist (as in 3-pin fans), the speed isn't (cannot be) varied at all by the PWM header.
On the other hand, when a you connect a PWM fan (4 pin) to a voltage controlled header (3 pin usually, but also some fake-4 pin ones), that header is still able to vary the fan speed, just directly reducing the voltage supplied to the fan (and possibly get rid of the PWM profile "stored" into that PWM fan, if any).

Providing the Linux fancontrol may control that CHA_FAN header, accordingly to the CPU temperature sensor (as lots of Windows utilities do), you can use the CHA_FAN header to gain those further 200rpm of quietness.

With reference to your PSU, you might swap its fan.

My PSU has a small fan, 3 or 4 cm diameter. I don't know If there's something I can do about the noise. The PSU is equipped with Thermaltake SD101 Mini-ITX case. Good case, well built, but I have totally underestimated the PSU noise level.
Given that my system power consumption is between 20W (idle) and 60W (full load, 4 cores at 3400Mhz, I5-4670) I'm thinking about an external brick PSU. I'm going to do some searches in this forum about this.

Using the CHA_FAN header for the cpu fan obliges me to plug the chassis fan into the CPU_FAN header, and as I already said the chassis fan runs fast & noisy. Without the chassis fan the PSU gets a little bit hotter and its fan speeds up... more noise. I'm stuck!

pan3 wrote:My PSU has a small fan, 3 or 4 cm diameter. I don't know If there's something I can do about the noise. The PSU is equipped with Thermaltake SD101 Mini-ITX case. Good case, well built, but I have totally underestimated the PSU noise level.
Given that my system power consumption is between 20W (idle) and 60W (full load, 4 cores at 3400Mhz, I5-4670) I'm thinking about an external brick PSU. I'm going to do some searches in this forum about this.

Using the CHA_FAN header for the cpu fan obliges me to plug the chassis fan into the CPU_FAN header, and as I already said the chassis fan runs fast & noisy. Without the chassis fan the PSU gets a little bit hotter and its fan speeds up... more noise. I'm stuck!

Definitely not a quiet setup: what about get rid of it, at all? Alternatively you may swap the PSU with a 1U Seasonic Gold unit.
Anyway, about the fans, in case you just need a splitter (and possibly a new fan: take a look to Scythe or Noctua 40mm fans, whether they should fit).