Good motherboard fan control
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Sizzle
- Patron of SPCR
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- Joined: Wed Mar 10, 2004 5:01 pm
- Location: Saginaw, Michigan
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Good motherboard fan control
Are there any manufacturers out there that have good built in fan control on their boards aside from Asus' Q-fan2?
I've been quite pleased with the fan control with my Abit motherboard. It uses variable DC voltage rather then PWM, so no fan clicking problems. The AI7 Socket 478 board I'm using only controls two headers, and only down to 8V, but I believe that several newer Abit boards control more (all?) headers and some of those headers go down to 6V.
I added a Zalman Fanmate 2 on the CPU header, and without any knob adjustment that fan now operates at 6-11V. (A resistor or diode would have worked as well.) The other header was intended for northbridge fan control (I went passive for NB), so I'm using that one to control the Nexus exhaust fan, where 8-12V works quite well.
The Abit adjustment is pretty simple - set low and high temps in BIOS for the header, and set the minimum voltage. I experimented some to determine "System Temps" for that exhaust fan control.
The only complication (maybe less so on newer boards) was figuring out how to disable the alarm when the NB fan was disconnected. It was not a BIOS option, but I got some decent help from the Abit USA forums to accomplish that.
I added a Zalman Fanmate 2 on the CPU header, and without any knob adjustment that fan now operates at 6-11V. (A resistor or diode would have worked as well.) The other header was intended for northbridge fan control (I went passive for NB), so I'm using that one to control the Nexus exhaust fan, where 8-12V works quite well.
The Abit adjustment is pretty simple - set low and high temps in BIOS for the header, and set the minimum voltage. I experimented some to determine "System Temps" for that exhaust fan control.
The only complication (maybe less so on newer boards) was figuring out how to disable the alarm when the NB fan was disconnected. It was not a BIOS option, but I got some decent help from the Abit USA forums to accomplish that.