The CPU and Case fans are controllable and the other two are not.

Gee, what a mess. So, to sum up, only the CPU fan can be assuredly controlled in the BIOS? And, a PWM fan in the sys_fan2 slot won't even work unless SpeedFan is used?

That is sheer madness. I was really leaning towards a P35 Gigabyte board of some sort due to all the rave reviews.

BIOS control of fans generally doesn’t give enough fine control to suit the silent PC crowd, although Abit have some more pimped out systems on some of their boards.
I’ve found Speedfan to be so reliable that I don’t even bother looking at BIOS control options.

It’s hard to say what the actual state of play is but from my experience all 4 Gigabyte boards (P35 & G33) that I’ve had hands on experience with in the last year or so allowed control of 2 fans with Speedfan which is the same for most non budget Asus boards (Q-Fan 2).

I have a Arctic Cooling plugged into the SYS_FAN2, it spins really quick at startup, then it's off. I'm wondering if the case temps we have are not high enough for the BIOS to give enough power to spin the fan. Did you turn off Smartfan to see if it would just spin the fan at 12v?

I have a GA-EP38-DS4

..

I initially had the same problem with a P35-DS3R 2.0 but I was able to overcome it with a bit of tweaking; here’s what I had to do:

Disable fan control in the BIOS.
In Speedfan I chose software control for the fan controller.

After that I could control 2 of the 4 fan headers and monitor the speeds. I used the latest Beta of Speedfan.

Weird because my Scythe Ninja is always at 100% (1100rpm) no matter if (CPU Smart Control) is enabled or not... and SpeedFan v4.33 doesn't do anything at all on every sensors unless the SYS_Fan2 and that one had to be the bugged one which don't deliver 12v... really p*ss off!

Looks like I'll have to use the 3 Zalman FanMates that I bought since I'll have no other way to slow down the speed of my 3 Scythe S-Flex fans... but since I also have the CPU-Fan and that SYS_Fan2 is useless, that mean I'll have to keep one of my fans at full speed (-_-). Crappy board

I have the EP35-DS3R and only the SYS_FAN2 was controlable through SpeedFan. Believe it or not, but my Scythe Ninja "3pin fan" couldn't be controlled both from the bios (F1) and Speedfan, weither the setting in the bios "CPU Fan Smart Control" was enabled or not. As for SYS_FAN1 and PWR_Fan, I could only monitor them so I had to use 3 (Zalman Fan Mate 2) in order to be able to have control on the speed of my fans.

*** By the way, the SYS_FAN2 doesn't output 12volt. My intake Scythe S-Flex 1200rpm was stuck at 350-400rpm at most and sometimes it would even not get enough power to start spinning. ***

total digression: i bought (a ds3l) on these reviews several months ago and have been resoundingly disappointed.

-stability, while great by ECS standards, is nowhere near OEM.

-sometimes refuses to post for no apparent reason

-bios with wolfdale support has been "beta" for 4 months

-stuff doesn't work:

usb input doesn't work for me pre-boot, no matter what bios options i set

(intermittent) usb input garbled

usb power isn't handled correctly

-stuff is missing:

no memory remap control in bios

again, the board is way better than any from the 3rd tier manufacturers, but it's not clear to me that there's a value add over asus/intel (although from what i've read asus quality is sliding..)

smilingcrow method worked beautifully!

disabled smart fan control and changed speedfan for software control in advanced tab under configure. i can now control my noisy 3pin fan. bios revision is a2 on my ds3.

cheers!

I’m glad to hear it helped. I had a feeling that it would at least on some Gigabyte boards; I hope more people give it a go.

just so you DS3L guys know, we have found a working vdroop mod... check it.


http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... hp?t=47965

I just made a minor switch from the P35-DS3R rev 1.0 to rev 2.1 and it looks like gigabyte made one important change to the cpu fan controls. Now there's no option to select between pwm and voltage for the smartfan. I used to have my cpu fan running at a nice quiet 800rpm and now it's spinning at the full 1350rpm. I'd prefer not to have to fanmate another fan, as I'm already doing that to my other 3.
I might try the smilingcrow method as a stopgap, but I'd prefer to just have the bios control the fan speed for cpu if possible.

I also did a little bios hacking and I've found the entry for choosing pwm or voltage is just hidden now. Unfortunately it looks like modbin6 is corrupting the bios image when I save it with the entry available...I'll need to find another way to reopen the entry. Also the pwm/voltage entry is set to permanently be pwm, which makes non-pwm fans not work at all. Gigabyte needs to enable the damn thing officially. There's no reason to keep it hidden. If I find a way to fully enable the entry safely, I'll post it

Reading these developments has made me wonder if I might be better off with an Abit IP35 Pro after all...

Personally I'm getting very annoyed. Gigabyte technical support has been terrible and will not give any useful information. If they keep this up, I will have to resort to being very negative about them. Sad because their boards are pretty nice. The saddest thing is them telling me to switch to a bios that doesn't solve anything. Pointless for them to even say.

I sold off my remaining stock of GA-P35-DS3, and moved to the IP35 Pro for my standard-build platform. This was done for three reasons:

1) BIOS problems with DPC latency remain unresolved
2) Chronic "beta" level BIOS for E8400 support.
3) No response from Gigabyte about getting DPC beta bios

No Response, No Resolution is going to hurt Gigabyte on this one. This is a real shame, as I really like these boards, but I have a business to run. I cannot run a business on flaky BIOS.

I'll join the front so to speak, just swapped my DS3R for an IP35 PRO. Only cost me an extra 10 euros and in exchange I now have peace of mind.

If only they would've had the XE in stock already, but oh well.

Scan had the IP-35 Pro on offer at £78.71 midweek with free delivery available. It’s very likely to be back on offer in the next week or two as it’s a regular in their Today Only Deals.