I think the listing of the Fan Xpert 2 upgrade against the Fan Xpert+ motherboards is just an error. As I understand it, Asus have said that Fan Xpert 2 uses a new IO chip on the motherboard to do the 3 pin fan calibration, which is the reason why it is only supported on the upper Z77 range. Fan Xpert+ seems to be Fan Xpert 2, minus the extended 3 pin fan support. It maybe that the Fan Xpert+ boards such as the P8Z77-V LX, LK and LE will actually run Fan Xpert 2. But they cannot do the 3 pin fan calibration because the hardware required to do it is simply not there.

Thanks for the initial data!

There is little information on fan xpert+ at asus, I only find this link:
http://rog.asus.com/78012012/overclocki ... fan-xpert/

There is several you tube videos concerning fan xpert 2 and this page at asus:
http://event.asus.com/2012/mb/P8Z77_Ser ... e3_fan.htm

As I am interested in knowing if 3-pin fans can be regulated from the chassis fan headers and how advanced the fan xpert+ is compared to fan xpert 2 now that speedfan probably doesn't work..

On the Asus Z77 boards the CPU header (and CPU_OPT header if there is one) will only work with 4 pin PWM fans. Chassis fan headers are 4 pin but will work with either 4 pin PWM or 3 pin fans. The minimum CPU and chassis fan speed is set to 600 rpm as standard with Asus motherboards; this needs to be set to 'Ignore' in the BIOS. If only Fan Xpert+ is available it will still give you more flexibility and options than the BIOS. Both Fan Xpert+ and Fan Xpert 2 will calibrate PWM fans, but only Fan Xpert 2 will calibrate 3 pin fans.

I guess potential Asus Z77 board purchasers need to work out just how much motherboard fan control they need, and how much it is worth paying for. The premium boards, apart from Fan Xpert 2, also have more fan headers than the less expensive boards and allow chassis fan headers to be individually controlled. Some boards also have both CPU and CPU_OPT headers which is a convenient way of running two PWM fans from the CPU header without needing a splitter cable.

Thank you lodestar, just the kind of answer I was looking for!

Cheers!
Casper

Undervolt results...

System specs...
Intel Core i5-3750k
ASUS P8H77-MPro
Samsung DDR3 1600 1.35V @9-9-9-24
Powercolor HD7770
Patrio Pyro SE 120GB
Samsung 2TB 54000rpm
Seasonic SS-460FL
Lite-on Blu-ray
Scythe Mugen 2
Scythe Slipstream PWM x2
Antec mini-P180 white

Nice: 13W savings at 0.1V offset. Thanks, Billy!

1.048V stock idle voltage is very high. My i7-2600K is idling at 0.97V.

It's not the idle voltage...this is Billy's earlier response to you:

Then please explain me what the value of 1.048 in BIOS Voltage column on stock row means ? If it means default idle voltage at stock settings, then his 22nm i5-3570K idles at 0.07V higher value than my i7-2600K, which is very hard to believe.

Yes it is best to clarify but have a look at mine below, it probably is the stock.

faugusztin I don't expect the lowest idle voltage has changed that much compared to sandy - don't get your hopes up.
From what I've read on the Interwebs it seems ivy has trouble with anything <0.9V. Maybe an effect of the new 3d transistors.

While I was doing my overclocking tests I accidentally put in too much of a negative offset causing me to go to ~0.8V at idle and I had the system freeze pretty quick.

At the same time, note Billy's power results - hardly any change at idle. Here's my results (all measured from AIDA64, not BIOS setting - which ASUS recommend):
Idle: Volts, Multiplier, power draw (AC)
0.9V, 16x, 78W
0.99V, 16x, 79W
1.024V (my stock), 16x, 79W
So, basically no difference.

The real power savings only come in load. I didn't actually look to optimise that as I went to mildly OC it instead. Here you can see some scaling up instead:

Load (IBT on very high): Volts, Multiplier, power draw (AC)
1.145V (my stock), 36x, 144W
1.176V, 42x, 157W
1.2V, 43x, 163W
1.24V, 44x, 175W

I think ASUS should consider letting us edit the multiplier voltage tables directly *per multiplier*
The offset method + load line calibration is a bit crude. It seems to work off a preset voltage table per multiplier, the offset just affects all of them equally and you rely on the LLC setting to ensure you have enough volts at the higher multipliers.

Initially my LLC setting set me at way too high (1.36!) a voltage while under load, so I have to actually run with a negative offset to counter that.
Effectively you have to "stretch" out the voltage table at both ends even though you only wanted a bit more headroom at the high multipliers (my initial offset to counter the LLC caused my idle to drop below <0.9V)

A tool like CPUgenie might let you edit each p-state voltage... but I haven't tried it on here, however I used CPUgenie on an old ASUS CULV notebook that helps me get around 10 hours of web-browsing battery time on it

The 1.048V is what is displayed when I go to the CPU voltage setting in the BIOS where I can set the offset. It doesn't appear to correlate directly to either the idle or load voltage. So I'm not sure what is in reference to exactly. But it does show the correct 0.1V offset that I applied. Even if the actual idle voltage appears to be dropping by more than that. Sorry for the confusion. I'll try to update it with my actual idle/load voltages.

Another note on power usage. Not sure if is the PSU or something with the MB/CPU, but I'm actually seeing 0W on my meter when the PC is off. Usually there's at least a watt or two even in the off position. (Off as in PC is off, not the PSU hard switch off) And when the PC is in sleep mode I'm only seeing 1W. That's pretty impressive as well.

I have an Asus P8Z77-M Pro mATX motherboard. My case is a Lian Li PC-7FN with one 140mm 1000rpm fan in the front and one 120mm 1300rpm fan in the back. Cpu cooler is a HR-02 with one TY-140 fan. The motherboard has 1 cpu fanheader and 3 casefanheaders. The cpu fan header can only control pwm fans. The casefan headers use voltage regulation and thus can control both 3-pin and 4-pin fans. They can be controlled independently.

Bios fancontrol options are the same as the reviewed board. You can set fans to constant full speed, choose one of the Asus presets (standard, silent, turbo) or manually enter lower and upper limit values based on cpu temp. The lower limit for the cpu fan is 20%, which is fine. The lower limit for the casefans however is 60%. This pretty much makes the bios fancontrol completely useless. Why this limit was imposed is a mystery to me, the only explanation I can think of is general incompetence.

Like previous Asus P67 and Z68 models, the latest version of Speedfan (4.46) cannot control fanspeeds on this motherboard. Sadly the IO chip is still not supported by this excellent piece of software. I wonder if this will change in newer versions of Speedfan or if there is some fundamental reason that prevents the IO chip from being read out.

The motherboard comes bundled with Fan Xpert+ which allows adjusting fanspeeds in Windows. Fan Xpert+ gives better and more precise control options than the bios. But it still comes short, because again, you cannot set a low enough limit for the casefans: this time it's capped at 40%. Cpu fan can still go down to 20%.

After reading this review I downloaded Fan Xpert 2 from the Asus site. It wasn't listed under the download section for my particular mobo but it works anyway. After lanching for the first time it did the fan check as mentioned in the review, determining minimum startup speeds and which header controls wich fan. Again artificial limits are imposed, this time it's the minimum startup speed, which as most here know is usually higher than the actual minimum rotation speed. Minimum cpu fan speed is now 30% instead of 20% in Fan Xpert+ and minimum speed for my front casefan is now 50% instead of 40% in Fan Xpert+. The minimum speed for my back casefan improved, from 40% in Fan Xpert+ to 20% in Fan Xpert 2 (obviously these values will depend on the fans you're using).

The biggest difference between Fan Xpert+ and Fan Xpert 2 though, is that the latter allows you to completely turn off the casefans under a certain temperature treshold. Personally I would prefer my fans to always spin at their lowest possible speed in idle but sound wise, an inactive fan can't be beaten. Drawback ofcourse is that case temps may rise (particularly hdd's might be very active while cpu is mostly idle). I do feel the need to mention that both Fan Xpert+ and Fan Xpert 2 require the ridiculous amount of 7 background pocesses to do a bit of fancontrol.

Concluding, without Fan Xpert 2 I probably would have traded this motherboard for something else because 40% minimum fanspeed is just too loud for me. But Fan Xpert 2's ability to turn off casefans sort of saves the day. Nevertheless, if you want perfect fancontrol I can only recommend Intel motherboards (all headers support both voltage and true pwm control, excellent bios options, Speedfan support). Second best would be Gigabyte this time, because although the bios options are very rudimentary, their motherboards are the only ones besides Intel's that allow Speedfan to control fanspeeds. Gigabyte's Z77 lineup also has more controllable fanheaders than previous P55/P67/Z68 models (which mostly had the pitiful amount of just 1 controllable casefan header).

Thanks for the comprehensive report sssttt. I have some Scythe 120mm PWM fans on the way and it will be interesting to see if they will be quiet with the minimum values permitted in Fan Xpert2. If not, I guess it's back to my trusty old fanmated Nexus 120mm fans.

What I found by experimentation was that the Asus BIOS setting of 'Silent' for 3 pin chassis fans was, at the lowest speed, the equivalent of setting the fan manually to around 7v. With a Scythe S-Flex SFF21D which has a nominal top speed of 800 rpm this resulted in an idle speed of about 450 rpm. I think a setting equivalent to around 7v is reasonable, as a safe level where virtually all 3 pin fans could be guaranteed to start. For many 3 pin fans it will not however result in particularly low idle speeds, or low enough noise levels. The solution then is to replace the 3 pin fans with PWM fans, and if you want minimal fan speeds select the models that can go really low like the Scythe SY1225SL12LM-P, the Noctua NF-P12 PWM and the Noctua NF-F12.

Welcome. And yep, like I said it depends on the particular fan you are using. When using low rpm fans the 40% limit is not so bad. My main gripe is you lose the flexibility of running higher rpm fans at low rpm when possible and still have good cooling under heavier loads. Videocards and cpu's are very cool during idle nowadays but can heat up a lot under stress. Also I don't like replacing perfectly fine fans with other ones, just because my motherboard can't properly control them. I just don't get why this is so hard to get right during this day and age. 22nm supercomputer in a small box? No problem, here ya go. Fully user configurable fancontrol? Now that's asking a lot there buddy.


Sounds right, 60% of 12V is aproximately 7V. About the starting voltage, it would make more sense to me to supply all fans with full 12V during boot up to make sure they start up and then have bios controls kick in after that. I could also understand setting it to 7V by default to prevent novice users from overheating their systems but then at least give those who do know what they are doing the possibility to go below this limit. Currently, Asus bios fancontrol just sucks imho.

Replacing 3-pin fans with pwm fans wouldn't help much, since the casefanheaders are voltage controlled and not by pwm. Unless pwm fans can generally start on lower voltage (I don't think they do).

One more thing: after restarting my pc the Fan Xpert 2 profile doesn't automatically kick in even though the Asus AI suite is started on bootup. I have to manually start the Fan Xpert 2 application for the profile to be activated.

@webs0r : So, when we talk about voltages, i wonder if this is a bug in CPU-Z or is really Ivy Bridge (i5-3570K) going this low at stock on P8Z77-I Deluxe when idling (=doing nothing in windows, pretty much nothing installed, no applications running) ?



And this is at load (OCCT CPU test, Large data set) :


In BIOS it is idling at 0.976V.

System power consumption at idle is 67W - P8Z77-I Deluxe, i5-3570k, 2x8GB GSkill Ares DDR3-1333, 4 fans, 1 SSD and one GTX570.

EDIT: AIDA64 is reporting 0.64-0.656V too.
EDIT2: ASUS Sensor Recorder says 0.632V as well.

So i suggest you webs0r to check your voltages in windows as BIOS voltages have pretty much zero corelation with the CPU voltages in Windows. Still, even your BIOS stock voltage is 0.07V higher than mine, with same CPU.

Hm all my reported voltages were AIDA64 voltages, not BIOS voltages.
Maybe its something special with your motherboard?

I had the same experience as here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5763/undervolting-and-overclocking-on-ivy-bridge
Where I had instability below 0.9V.

Unless you have a special processor

Did you undervolt or you system is just like this??
I'm not using an EPU options...

No, i didn't set any overclock settings at all. This is as much stock as possible on this board. I will make more screenshots later.

By the way, FanXpert2 works on P8Z77-I Deluxe as well. It has only two 4-pin fan connections, both can be auto-detected and controlled using the FanXpert2 application. Unfortunately 2 fan connectors is way too low number, as my CPU cooler itself occupies both of these, and i have no extra connectors for case fans.

My cpu idle at 0.6 something as well. But we don't have a special processor, we're just talking about idle, while you are talking about load. From your link: "The lowest voltage my processor would run at while under full load was 0.900 volts".


Well, it's a mITX board. Not much room in general.

Does anyone know what the temperature sensor labelled "Motherboard" on this board is actually measuring? Mine sits at 38, compared to CPU at 29/30 (idle), and I was curious whether it was measuring VRMs, PCH, or something different. 38 would be quite high for ambient air temperature around the board in general, but probably not an issue for a measurement taken on the VRM chips...

Oh I see.
Hm well it is strange, I did note down AIDA64 idle readings at stock... and I was getting 1.024V - with no load applied!

I wonder what experiences others are getting with the P8Z77-V lineup specifically, maybe ASUS have done something different...

AlexV: don't know what the sensor is measuring, mine is between 24-29 deg C (ambient is probably 17 C at the moment) but this is in an Silverstone FT02 case. I've found it hard to get much variation in beyond the range i mentioned (varying load and varying fan speeds).

Is the USB 3.0 BIOS-bootable? Can you boot & run an OS from a USB3 flash drive?

Finally got my Scythe PWM fans (http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/0 ... etail.html) and was able to play with Fan Xpert2 briefly last night.

The tuning was a breeze and required one button press. With these fans the program works very well - the lowest setting of 30% is under 400 rpm which is essentially inaudible and if that bothers you, as noted earlier, you can even have the fans turned off below a certain threshold or a combination (for example, the standard silent profile shuts off all case fans but keeps the CPU fan going at just south of 400rpm so there is some airflow) although there seems to be no ability to have the fans operate between off and the 30% threshold (this has been confirmed to be a case where a minimum voltage is needed before fans can typically reliably spin up so the 30% cutoff was coded by Asus).

Once Asus has it set up so that the profile loads upon bootup (apparently this is coming in the next update), it will be a complete package.

I know I'm responding to my own post but I wanted to bump this in case people are still interested in Asus Fan Control Software Options. As everyone knows, the problem with the Fan Xpert2 software is that it appears to be limited to controlling fans in relation to CPU temp only.

Note that the Sabertooth Z77 motherboard has a comprehensive suite of thermal probes on board (CPU, Motherboard, VCORE, VCORE (Back), VCCIO/VCCSA, iGPU, DRAM, PCH, USB3, SATA6G, PCIE-1 and PCIE-2) described by Asus as Thermal Radar. One of the things that was always strange to me was why Fan Xpert2 is not listed as a program for this motherboard even though it works with the board. It turns out that this is because Sabertooth Z77 has its own fan control program located in the Thermal Radar part of AI Suite II.

The best part of the Thermal Radar fan control software is that each fan can be ramped individually (except the CPU Fan and CPU_OPT Fan, which are linked) in relation to up to *three* thermal probes on the board. So, for example, instead of the CHA1 fan being tied to CPU temp as in Fan Xpert2, in the Thermal Radar fan control program, it can be tied to, for example, Motherboard temp or a formula based on Motherboard, DRAM and/or PCI-E temps (the default setting for one chassis fan takes 40% of the Motherboard temp, 40% of the DRAM temp and 20% of the PCIE-1 temp and adds the results for the temperature on which the fan ramps). However, unlike in Fan Xpert2, you cannot designate the speed of the fan ramping up or ramping down. Also, the minimum for the case fans is only 40%.

I wish the 4-pin CPU fan header would control 3-pin fans like the chassis fan headers. That would make it a viable motherboard only solution. Why is ASUS not giving the CPU fan headers the same functionality as the chassis fan headers?

It's not clear exactly why; the reason may have to do with Intel requirements, the main advantage being that (all other things being equal) PWM allows a fan to be run slower/quieter if so desired. All Intel stock HSF have had 4-pin PWM fans for several years, and most current aftermarket coolers have moved to 4-pin PWM fans, too. In any case, because most of the boards w/ FX2 have so many fan headers, it's easy to go into the BIOS to have it ignore the the CPU fan header and use others w/ 3-pin fans -- if that's what you have & want to use -- then rename the appropriate header as the CPU Cooler in FX2, which you can surely set to turn on automatically on Windows bootup (I haven't tried this, I admit).

New AI Suite with Fan Xpert2 1.00.18:

http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?S ... shedid=n/a

At work so no idea what the improvements are.

Do you have any idea of which motherboards can use Fan Xpert 2 the same way as your motherboard?

Just to chime in here... I just built an Ivy system using a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H mobo. Fan controls in the bios and the windows app (easy tune) is extremely rudimentary. I use speedfan to control the fans.
Also speedfan has no problem controlling 3pin fans plugged into the fanheaders. There are a few quirks (in my experience) with this mobo concerning the fan headers tho:

CPU FAN can be controlled individually.
SysFAN 1,2,3 are controlled as a group.
SysFAN 4 runs flat out and cannot be controlled.