Best way to control Gigabyte PWM fan headers through OS?

[spat55]

Do I need speed fan? I use a voltage changer for my fans but might get some PWM alternatives as I need some that shift more air.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Do I need speed fan? I use a voltage changer for my fans but might get some PWM alternatives as I need some that shift more air.

My firsthand experience may be of some help. I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R -- an LGA-775 motherboard that is almost six years old. The machine has been through a few incarnations. It spends many hours "asleep," and so I only began to address thermal-control for noise reduction in recent weeks.

Go the Gigabyte's web-site download pages and look for the Easy Tune utility for the board. It contains a feature called Smart Fan, which should allow you to define a fan curve for a PWM fan powered off the CPU_FAN plug -- and possibly for other PWM ports on the motherboard.

If you can only control one fan (CPU fan) from the motherboard by temperature, you can spend $10 on a "splitter" like the Swiftech 8W-PWM-SPL-ST. The device plugs into the CPU_FAN header, but only for the PWM signal. You can then connect to the Swiftech as many as eight fans of mixed amperage and size, to control them with the CPU PWM signal and power them directly from your PSU.

 

[spat55]

My firsthand experience may be of some help. I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R -- an LGA-775 motherboard that is almost six years old. The machine has been through a few incarnations. It spends many hours "asleep," and so I only began to address thermal-control for noise reduction in recent weeks.

Go the Gigabyte's web-site download pages and look for the Easy Tune utility for the board. It contains a feature called Smart Fan, which should allow you to define a fan curve for a PWM fan powered off the CPU_FAN plug -- and possibly for other PWM ports on the motherboard.

If you can only control one fan (CPU fan) from the motherboard by temperature, you can spend $10 on a "splitter" like the Swiftech 8W-PWM-SPL-ST. The device plugs into the CPU_FAN header, but only for the PWM signal. You can then connect to the Swiftech as many as eight fans of mixed amperage and size, to control them with the CPU PWM signal and power them directly from your PSU.

Thanks for the reply, I'll go on Gigabyte' website and see what it is like 🙂

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thanks for the reply, I'll go on Gigabyte' website and see what it is like 🙂

I wish you good luck and hope this fills the bill for you.

A lot of folks have some mean things to say about bundled motherboard software. For instance, one finds many posts "dissing" the Asus AI Suite software. But at least the mobo-makers have attempted to address the issue of thermal fan control, and software designed specifically for the hardware is better than some utility like SpeedFan -- good in its own right, but not the ideal solution.