CPU Fan Connection on Mobo malfunctioning????

[cumminspuller]

Well my ASUS K8N-E Deluxe CPU fan connection does not seem to be working. As a side note I have a AMD 64 3000. Came home the other day and the computer had shut off. No power failure that I can tell, all clocks in the house were still on time and not flashing. So I do not think it was power failure related. So I restarted the computer and was watching the CPU fan and it would startup and run for about 5 seconds then stop. So I unplugged from CPU fan connection and connected to PWR FAN connection and fan runs fine. Any ideas on what is going on? Do I need another mobo? I do have Cool 'n Quiet enabled in the BIOS. If any other information is required please let me know.

Thank you,

Jason

 

[mechBgon]

If you have Q-Fan enabled, you might want to disable that. I'm not sure what the dynamic is between Q-Fan and Cool 'n Quiet. I'm down at work with my K8N-E Deluxe now so I might goof around with it and see what it does on mine.

 

[mechBgon]

I enabled Smart Q-Fan and doodled with the settings. It can be set to turn the CPU fan off and on, and ramp its voltage and etc. So I think we got the cause of your fan shutting off, if Smart Q-Fan is enabled. Now, why your computer decided to turn off entirely, I can only speculate... was it set up to do a Hibernate or a Standby, perhaps?

 

[cumminspuller]

Well I tried disableing Cool n' Quiet and plugged the fan back into the cpu fan and it still did not work with Q-fan enabled. It seems as long as one is enabled and the other disabled everything should be fine. So it sounds like your setup is Cool n' Quiet enabled and Q-Fan disabled? I tried going to ASUS's site and getting the Cool n' Quiet program, but the link seem sto be dead. I have the driver installed.

I am going to try disableing q-fan and enableing cool n' quiet and see how that works.

Jason

 

[mechBgon]

Q-Fan will shut the fan off if the CPU temperature remains below the threshold you choose. If the temp reaches the threshold, it will fire up the fan at whatever voltage you select as the starting voltage. You can specify a CPU temp at which you want the fan to hit full speed, too. I don't know if it ramps up linearly or what.

Cool 'n Quiet runs the CPU at a lower MHz and voltage when it's got a light workload, so that could help keep the temps low enough that Q-Fan turns the fan off and leaves it off, I guess.

I normally run my 3000+ at full 2.0GHz all the time, with Q-Fan disabled too, but that was an interesting experiment

 

[cumminspuller]

So how did yours act with both enabled? Mine has been running with both enabled for a few days. But once in a while on startup I would get a CPU Fan Failed error, but I would visually check and the fan would be running. Well I disabled the q-fan and everything works fine. It is odd to me to have both programs in the BIOS yet they conflict each other.

Jason

 

[mechBgon]

I told it to start the fan at 6.0 volts if the CPU temp went over 48C (picked this for no particular reason), so on reboot the fan shut off completely for a while, then started running the fan again as the CPU heated up enough to meet the 48C threshold. I ran CPU-Z to confirm that the CPU was doing 800MHz when idle.

Oh, and I was getting the beeps and CPU Fan Fail error too, press F1 to continue and so on. I think the hardware monitoring can be turned off for the CPU fan and if I leave the system set that way, I might remember to do that eventually It doesn't get rebooted too often, usually just runs 24/7 down there at the office.

My cooler is an Alpha PAL8150 with a Vantec Stealth 80mm fan on it, probably not any better at cooling than the retail AMD heatsink/fan combo actually. Maybe it's a little quieter, I haven't heard the stock one in operation.

 

[cumminspuller]

How about when you get a chance, disableing cool n' quiet and enabling q-fan and see if you get the same result.......cpu fan not running. Well it took a few days for it to comletely quit.

Jason

 

[mechBgon]

I will try that. If the CPU is running at full speed all the time (meaning, Cool 'n Quiet is turned off) then I expect its temperature will go high enough that Q-Fan turns the CPU fan on, unless I pick a very high threshold temperature for it to start the fan (like, 80C or something).

Also, if I were to pick the lowest possible start-up voltage for the fan, it might not be able to get the motor rolling. For instance, if I have a fan that needs 6.0 volts to start the motor, and I set Q-Fan's start-up voltage to 5.0 volts, the fan won't run at first. As the CPU heats up and Q-Fan ramped up the voltage, hopefully it would eventually unstall the fan motor and begin running.

So I think really the two are not directly related. CnQ can change the CPU's MHz and voltage, and Q-Fan can react to the resulting changes in CPU temperature by turning the fan off and on at the hardware level, but I don't think they're "aware" of eachother, they just each look at the CPU's workload or temperature, and react accordingly.