Well, I agree that the Asus bios fancontrol is a step in the right direction. My only real objection to it (apart from the inability to control 3-pin fans on the cpu fanheader and having to buy a pwm fan) is the fact you can't set the chassis fans to less than 40%. I don't understand why such an artificial limitation had to be put in place. The same goes for Intel, why would you limit a header to 6V? My system is very cool during idle/light loads, there is no need for cpu or casefans to spin at all. A second nuisance is that the 2 chassis fan headers cannot be controlled independently, but I'm willing to overlook that.MikeC wrote:I'm not sure I agree with you on this. BIOS fan controls basically cannot be broken, unlike all in-OS utilities -- even speedfan. Unless you have a need to manually change the fan speed, why would you not use the Asus BIOS fan controls? They are extremely customizable, can be completely automated to respond precisely to thermal conditions AND stay quiet (with the right hardware mix, of course) and even the stock silent mode is very good. Puget uses them for great results in... http://www.silentpcreview.com/Serenity_ ... _Bridge_PCsssttt wrote:Thank you for this review. The lack of fan control on the Asus board when using a 3-pin fan on the cpu fanheader eliminates it from my shortlist. Without this review I never would have found out till I bought it. Speedfan is more convenient than bios control...
Now I'll admit that fex. 1500 x 0.40 = 600rpm is fairly silent. But it's more a matter of principle and that's also where Speedfan comes in. If I want to completely turn off my fans I should be able to do so. If I want fan 2 to spin faster but not fans 1 & 3 when HDD 4 reaches a certain temperature I should be able to do so. Speedfan offers this flexibilty and I also like how it conveniently shows temps and voltages. I have found Speedfan automatic control to be very reliable. And there is an option to set fans to 100% on program exit.
Anyways, I noticed there's a new beta version of Speedfan, 4.43. From the changelog:
"Beta 6 improves fan control for IT8712F and adds full support for IT8721F (that was often mistakenly identified as an IT8718F). IT8721F support for fan control has been fully verified and it works great. This beta starts to add support for Fintek F71809 and Fintek F71859. Please contact me if you have any of the two. Several other fixes and improvements are there."
It would be interesting to see if this version works on the Asus boards. Since I'm wondering if the issue has to do with Speedfan or with the Asus boards themselves. (like on some P5 boards where Speedfan wouldn't work after updating the bios).