Speedfan vs Fancontrol

[psyopper]

Why am I not surprised that once I figured out how to get fancontrol working in Ubuntu 10.04 it would work far better that SpeedFan in Windows 7?

It's like Speed Fan randomly forgets how to control my fans and spins them up to 100%. Worse is that no matter what I try I can't seem to get them back under control. Very annoying.

[ascl]

I think this is very dependent on the specific motherboard (and hence controller) you are using. I had no end of problems with Speedfan and an Asus board, but the gigabyte boards I've had since then have worked fine. I really wish the source for speedfan was open, as it would make fixing these kinds of issues possible!

[psyopper]

Interestingly my issue with Speedfan right now is on a Gigabyte H55 board.

[KayDat]

Speedfan probably just needs to be setup properly. Do you often install and remove hard drives? If Speedfan detects a new temperature reading, it defaults to associating it with every fan, so if say a new HDD you just plugged in was warm, it would spin up every fan in your system.

[psyopper]

I'll have to go back through and check my temp -> speed relationships. I haven't changed anything specifically on this motherboard, but it did just come back from an RMA repair.

[KayDat]

A good indication that something has changed is when you load up SpeedFan, and a taskbar tooltip/notification bubble comes up, giving you a list of sensors detected. This only happens once though, so you'll probably have to dig into the settings to check.

[dukla2000]

Why am I not surprised that once I figured out how to get fancontrol working in Ubuntu 10.04 it would work far better that SpeedFan in Windows 7?

5 years since I tried to tweak any fans in Windows so cant compare directly. But figure this is hardly surprising - the nature of Linux is that when you dig deep enough you can usually find the raw parameters and tweak them directly. For PWM control /etc/fancontrol is lots of fun. (The downside of Linux is that as a newbie you can go mental trying to find the parameters in today's version: many of the search results relate to previous versions and stuff keeps moving!)

But methinks the root cause is actually the symbiosis between the PWM controller and the fan: in practice there is an 8-bit register allowing 256 levels of PWM control whereas in practice things are much coarser. My current Fintek/Nexus combo is off at 62 or 63 and at max by 135, so any algorithm that ranges from 0 to 255 is suboptimal. A previous combo I had an effective range from 180-255. I don't think there is any way SpeedFan can cope with this in an optimal way unless it allows you to set the ranges yourself. Hell, even on my current config the first test stopped the fan at 63: a later trial had the fan doing about 3rpm, very squeaky at 63, and only totally stopped at 62. Who knows whether this was ambient temps, fan wear or what.