On the importance of fan curves

[Essence_of_War]

I am thoroughly embarrassed.

I was not pleased with how loud my case fans were, and I was doubly disappointed because it didn't sound like the fan controller on the carbide 500R did anything about it.

I am a moron.

I never set up a fan curve for my CPU cooler, so it was pegged to "Full On" all of the time. The obnoxious fan noises I was hearing were not the case fans, they were the CPU fan. With a proper fan curve in place, my whole system is now fairly quiet when idle'ing, and even better, I can actually hear the difference the fan controller makes when the CPU cooler is also at low RPMs. When I'm doing basic web browsing, or simple video playback, the whole system is whisper quiet.

 

[doyll49]

Glad it's working.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Glad it's working.

As I understand it, ASRock is an ASUS subsidiary. I have used more ASUS boards than Gigabyte, eVGA or Intel.

Interesting how first impressions -- say, from an old P5T533 board I had in 2003 turned me off to Asus Suite, Probe etc. One can then be blind to enhancements and improvements so the realization comes a tad late.

I was pleased enough at how I can manage fan control in my ASUS BIOS, but didn't play much with it. Now I find that Fan Expert does things I had expected to work with the NVidia ESA Silverstone Commander, but didn't.

But depending on the money you spent on your motherboard, you still have limited fan-control options. Even so, you can control a whole string of fans from the PWM CPU_FAN header with a PWM splitter, power them directly from the PSU and take the power draw off the mobo. But you can only monitor one fan in the array with such a splitter. And if there is a mix of PWM and 3-pin motherboard headers, your options for the latter fan-type are still limited to the number of ports.