SPCR

Is Asus' FanXpert II/III the best automatic fan control setup?
compared to Asrock, MSI or Gigabyte?

antiatavist wrote:Is Asus' FanXpert II/III the best automatic fan control setup?
compared to Asrock, MSI or Gigabyte?

Talking about software (not UEFI), it's SpeedFan (IMO/IME).

It worths to mention that ASRock (Haswell) fan control is about on par with ASUS (Haswell).

Asus' FanXpert II/III software works in conjunction with additional hardware on the boards that support it. It allows both PWM and 3-pin fan speeds to be dropped to levels which are potentially much lower than any other software/hardware combination. Some Asus motherboards have BIOS level Fan Stop control (the fan does not run until a target CPU temperature is reached). Regardless of which board it is FanXpert II/III can do this in software, there is nothing quieter than a fan that is not running at all.

The potential downside of this approach is that most Asus motherboards only allow fan control up to a CPU temperature of 70 or 75C. After that all fans will be set to run at 100%. However replacing the stock cooler with something like a 160mm tower unit with a 120mm PWM fan plus reasonable case air flow should be enough to contain CPU temperatures unless extreme overclocking is envisaged.

Some people simply do not like fan control software of any sort and prefer BIOS control. The Asus BIOS Silent profile used in conjunction with fans like the Noctua 120mm series may well be enough on its own. Typically it allows control from 20% PWM duty cycle and holds fan speed constant until the CPU temperature hits 40C. Only then does it begin to ramp up fan speeds. With a Noctua fan like the NF-F12 on a NH-U12S cooler the BIOS Silent profile would typically give idle speeds in the 350 to 450 range depending on ambient temperature. Using FanXpert II/III software would reduce this to more like 250 to 350 rpm.

lodestar wrote:Some people simply do not like fan control software of any sort and prefer BIOS control.

Like me. I only want UEFI control.

Because I use Linux, and Windows-based fan control is pretty much useless on Linux.

I am a software developer, so I do understand the benefits of controlling fans from a software agent running under an OS (more sophisticated controls, better user notification, cheaper to develop, easier to update, ...), however, I'll stick with hardware (BIOS/UEFI) control until vendors start releasing reliable fan control software for Linux.

figment wrote:Because I use Linux, and Windows-based fan control is pretty much useless on Linux.

Have you ever considered using fancontrol application? It's open source and works really well. I used it to silence my noisy case fans. The result is simply impressive. Fancontrol is part of lm_sensors, which supports most of the chipsets sensing temperatures, fan speeds, etc.