I just built myself a new system - Athlon II X4 635 and a Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H with a Samurai ZZ HSF. I plan on getting a pair of case fans to spin at a low RPM.

For those that have the MA785GM-US2H, what utility do you use to control fan speed? Do I need one just to control the case fans because the CPU has a PWM fan or do I need to control the CPU fan with a software utility too?

I could also use a recommendation for a pair of case fans that wont break the bank.

You don't have to use anything if you don't want to - Gigabyte has decent BIOS-based fan control. IRC, it does dynamic control on the CPU fan header (both for PWM and regular fans) and static (fixed speed) control on the SYS fan header. If you prefer a more customizable solution, SpeedFan works on that board as well.

Assuming you need 120mm fans, I recommend Yate Loon D12SL-12s and Scythe Slip Streams (Kaze Jyuni). They're affordable, sound smooth, and perform well compared to other fans (at similar noise levels).

I see that the Scythe Slipstreams come in 2 variations on Newegg. There is the 12H and 12L. I'm assuming the only difference in these fans is the RPM they are rated for? The 12L is 800RPM while the 12H is 1600RPM. My case is a mATX silverstone with 1 HDD, a DVD Drive, onboard video, and a 785g mATX board, and an Earthwatts 430. I use it for video encoding and Photoshop. Would it be worth it to spend the extra money on the 1600RPM fans or not? I'm assuming no since I don't have a video card or any super-hot components?

Your noise tolerance might be higher than mine, but I would try to keep it under 1000rpm. Also if you get the 1600rpm model you won't be able to slow it down as much. For your situation, the speed shouldn't really make much of a difference either way except for noise. With a decent CPU cooler, as long as you have some airflow going in the case you should be fine.

I have an ATX case with an overclocked Q9550 and I run my exhaust fan at only 600rpm, 1000rpm on load.

The BIOS fan control on this board is actually pretty lacking. You can have it automatically control the CPU and/or system fan, but the CPU fan ramps up way more aggressively than is necessary IMO. And unfortunately Gigabyte doesn't provide different profiles to choose from for the CPU fan speed control (for example, you could select either "quiet" or "performance" modes, where "performance" would obviously ramp up faster but cool better; even my four year old ASRock budget board had this option). There's no setting for target temperature like on ASUS, MSI, and a lot of other boards. I'm actually very disappointed in this aspect of the board, it's seriously lacking.

System fan, however, doesn't ramp up very quickly, so I just have a passive CPU cooler and then let the motherboard automatically control the case fans (I bought two of those Arctic Cooling 120mm fans that allow you to split PWM, so they're both run from the system fan header). At idle they spin at 300-400RPM, and at load 500-600RPM. This is about perfect for my system, provides adequate cooling and is very, very quiet.

Or if you want to control speed yourself, SpeedFan should work with this board. This post explains how to set SpeedFan up so you can switch control from the BIOS to software.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... ht=#504019

I just installed Gigabyte's utility to see what it was like. At idle my CPU is around 40 degrees and the fan is at 1800RPM when I let the motherboard "smart" control the fan speed. However, I can set the utility to manual fan speed control and decrease the fan speed to about 900RPM without seeing an increase in idle temp. Clearly, the motherboard is overzealous in controlling the fan. This is kind of disappointing. I wonder if this will be fixed in a bios update.