Asus Pundit P1-AH2 - Q-Fan Control missing?

[petzlux]

Hi guys

I have a Asus Pundit P1-Ah2 barebone, which I want to use as a HTPC. I bought it as it claimed to have the Q-Fan technology, eg Asus way to control fan speed according to CPU temperature.
Unfortunately, in the BIOS, the Q-Fan options are missing, even though in the BIOS manual, they explain all of the options for that section.

I tried contacting Asus about that, but they have been useless and only pointed out again that its in the hardware monitor section (I know, but it isnt there !!!!)

Does anyone else here have this PC model, and are you missing Q-Fan as well ? Does the bios version make a difference ?

Thanks for your help

[late2bed]

I have a Asus Pundit P1-Ah2 barebone, which I want to use as a HTPC.

can't answer your question, but I would be interested to hear your impressions of the P1-AH2. is it reasonably quiet?

[nutball]

Does anyone else here have this PC model, and are you missing Q-Fan as well ? Does the bios version make a difference ?

I have built ... quite a number of these (*counts on fingers*... *counts on toes*) twelve of these. All of them have the fan control working fine. I just enabled it in the BIOS and off it went. The fans spin up to full speed when it powers on, but slow down by the time the BIOS has finished its POST.

is it reasonably quiet?

Not even close. Quieting them will require some careful selection of components too. Problems are:

- little scope for soft mounting a 3.5" drive, so you're looking at suspending a 2.5" drive, going without an optical drive, or replacing the standard drive cage (which mounts both the hard-drive and the optical drive).
- little scope to change the stock CPU heatsink, because the HSF mounting holes, etc. aren't standard AM2. If they were you'd be hard pushed to put a decent quiet HSF in there because the drive bay butts up against the stock HSF ... a Zalman 7x00 just plain wouldn't fit unless you cut big chunks out of it, for example.
- you could change the stock CPU fan for a quiet 80x25mm, just about. You'd have to jury-rig the mount, and it'd be in contact with the side of the case, so you'd like have to mod a larger vent hole to allow air in
- the PSU fan is a 70x15mm model, finding a quiet replacement would be hard. Replacing it with a 80x25mm by taking a Dremel to the PSU case would be hampered by the PSU mounts, and by the cables coming out of the back of the optical drive.

So... it's a nice idea, and maybe worth doing if you've got a couple of hundred currency units spare. If you're looking for quiet with minimal effort, forget this barebones as a starting point!

[Meke]

I have this exact same problem. I'll try to shed some light on this issue.

I bought a P1-AH2 back in fall of last year. I have had an Athlon 3200 running on it nicely since then, but decided recently that I needed a processor with a bit more grunt. So, I went and got a 3800+, installed it, and everything worked fine. Well, almost. The motherboard didn't recognize the exact model of the processor (it was an "unknown Athlon 64 model"). I figured this was because the processor is a new one and the BIOS is still stock. I got the newest updated BIOS from Asus' website, flashed it, and lo and behold, now the motherboard recognizes my new processor.

If only the update would have changed just that one thing ..

The first thing I actually noticed on booting the computer was that the CPU fan was a lot louder. I went back to the BIOS setup and the hardware monitor showed that the temps were 31 C and the fan was rotating at 2010 RPM. A bit excessive, since with the stock BIOS it was 35 C and 1200 RPM. Now with the older BIOS you could change the CPU fan voltage down to 3.0 V ("CPU Fan Low Voltage"). I had mine set on 3.5 V, because the fan wouldn't start to spin at any lower.

Well, here comes the problem. This setting is completely missing from this "updated" BIOS. I'm not kidding. Everything I've circled in this image:

www [dot] kolumbus.fi/samuraiukot/oldbios.png

is missing from the new Hardware Monitor (what's amusing is that this image is originally taken from the "up-to-date" user's manual)

I also tried flashing some of the older BIOS images that were available on Asus' support page. Same problem. It would seem that only the stock BIOS has the necessary settings to control the CPU fan.

I'm going to email this to Asus and post this on its website. In the meantime, could anyone supply me with the original BIOS image? I was an idiot and forgot to dump it before I updated the new one to the motherboard. Also, if anyone could let me know what are the other options I have to control the CPU fan, that would be great. It's a bog-standard three-wire 60mm fan.

Thanks.

[Tom P]

I put (only) one Pundit P1-AH2 together for a relative so will add thoughts in this thread for anybody that might be interested.

I used a retail Athon 64 X2 3600+ processor and used the heatsink that came with the processor. The AVC fan that came with the processor appeared to be a lower-speed version of the one that came with the Pundit and ran at 775 RPM at bootup, which tripped the BIOS low-fan-speed warning (BIOS options were turn the warning off, 800RPM, and I forget what else). Since stability and safety were most important for this PC, I used the Asus-supplied fan, which ran considerably faster at bootup and idle and which fit perfectly on the AMD heatsink. My subjective impression is that the fan also ran slower under Win XP with drivers installed from the Pundit install CD than under MS Vista, which has all the AMD and Nvidia drivers (but not Realtek sound) built-in.

I used a WD 2.5" SATA drive in the hopes of keeping things a bit cooler and quieter. My personal opinion is that for all but the silence-obsessed (okay, so that's 95% of SPCR readers) this PC is "quiet enough", especially if you keep it under the desk where your old tower used to sit!

I updated the BIOS right after assembling the Pundit so can't speak to any differences between the old and newer ones as far as fan speeds or adjustments.

Just noticed that this thread was under "CPUs and Motherboards" rather than the SFF/Barebones section, but oh well.