Need Help With Fan Speed Control

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merk66

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Just bought a Cooler Master HAF X Case and put in my Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH motherboard with i5-3570K onboard.

I decided to plug the 4 case fans to the motherboard, expecting to be able to control them with speedfan or something. The fans have 3 wire plugs and the motherboard has 4 pins on each. I have googled this all night and came up either empty or not finding the answer I am looking for.

Is there any way to control the fans with the motherboard or should I just settle for the molex adapters that came with the fans? I really wanted these fans to spin up based on the system temperatures.

Thanks to anyone helpful enough to answer.
 
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John Bauer
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envy14tpe

envy14tpe

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The only way the mobo can control fan speed automatically is if both case and fan have 4 wire plugs. However, you can use programs to control the fan speeds yourself.

The first thing to do is set the fan speed you want in the BIOS. This way every time your computer starts the fans will have that level. say 3 or 8.

Then you gotta use a program to will allow you to manually adjust your fan speeds. For example, my build has a ASRock mobo, so there is a program called AXTU. It is essentially a program for overclocking (which I don't use since it should be done in the BIOS) and for fan control. Whenever, I am going to play a game like BF3 or FarCry3, I will first manually adjust the speeds of my fans to settings I want in AXTU. And once I'm done gaming I return the fans to the speed/quietness I prefer. So, look for Gigabyte software that will give you this program.
 
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envy14tpe

envy14tpe

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Yes SpeedFan is very good. However, I ran into the unfortunate situation where if you have a Dell Ultrasharp monitor and run SpeedFan then your computer can't go into standby or hibernate. Really weird. I know it sounds like BS but it's true. With that said, I'm sure 99% of people don't use a Ultrasharp monitor.
 
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John Bauer

John Bauer

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I don't let my computer go into hibernate or sleep. It's on and runnin all day every day.

I deleted hibernate, actually..
 
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merk66

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@envy14tpe
My BIOS appears to only function with PWM. I checked this out first. It will allow manual control, but only PWM ratios based on temp. I could not find any other option in there. So then I moved on to Speedfan. I will check to see if Gigabyte offers any solution. The issue may not be that big of a deal anyway. I assume that the fans are running at 100% right now and 3 of these fans actually only turn at 700 RPM. The rear fan should run at 1200 RPM. Speedfan reports that all of my fans are running at near 700 RPM at the moment, so I'm not sure if this is accurate.
Believe it or not, I run a U2410 Dell Ultrasharp monitor :)
Like John Bauer though, I do not let my PC go into standby or hibernate and I deleted hibernate as well. I do shut it down at night though.

@John Bauer
Thanks for the link, I will read it in a moment.
 
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merk66

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Just to clarify, I cannot use PWM because the fans only have 3 wires, not 4. I read your link, John, and I suppose you may not have realized PWM was not an option for me. I think what I expected, was that there must be a way to control the fan speed by varying the voltage. This must not be possible though.
 
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envy14tpe

envy14tpe

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I'm not sure how you use your computer...light gaming or what not, but if you do stress the system then you need good cooling. I use 2fans that are 600--2000rpm and another that is 1000-1450rpm. When gaming I need these fans running at 80% otherwise I prefer them at 30% for normal computer use. The ASRock AXTU software, like SpeedFan, can control the voltage sent to the fans. It's annoying having to adjust fan speeds before and after gaming but it keeps my CPU and GPU under 65C so I'm happy to do so.
 
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merk66

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So here is what I ended up with...
I downloaded Easy Tune 6 from Gigabyte and discovered that I could in fact control a system fan, only one, but it was the one that I would most like to control. The interface of Easy Tune 6 sucks, so I moved back to Speedfan to try some ideas out. I started studying Speedfan really close and googled everything I could think of. I found in the Configure>Advanced>Chip:IT8728F at $A30 on ISA tab, settings for PWM 1 mode, PWM 2 mode, and PWM 3 mode. By playing around with these, I discovered that I could, in fact, control my CPU fan and Rear case fan, but not the front, side, or top fans. The rear case fan is the most important to control for me, since it has max rpm of 1200. The other case fans all max at 700. By the way, the 3 700 rpm fans move 110 cfm each and the 1200 rpm fan moves around 60. This totals around 220 cfm going in and 170 going out. I think that is adequate for my 4.3 Ghz overclock and 7950 GPU overclocked to 1100 Mhz. Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked, the key was putting PWM 1 mode to ON/OFF, PWM 2 mode to Software controlled, and PWM 3 mode to Software controlled. Then in the Configure>Fan Control tab, I checked the box for Advanced fan control and then made profiles for the Rear fan, CPU fan, and GPU fan. I linked the Rear fan to Pwm2 and the Temp to what I believe is the CPU Die (it seems to show temps slightly lower than my core temps under load) and I linked the CPU fan to Pwm3 and the Temp to all 4 cores with the Method on MAX of speeds. Finally I linked the GPU fan to it's respective pwm and temp, which is much more straightforward. After tweaking the curves a bit and renaming sensors, etc. I have it working in an acceptable manner. Hopefully google will find this and there will finally be a post out here to give someone confidence that this is possible, because I was one step away from just giving up on it.

Thanks envy14tpe and John Bauer. I appreciate your help in solving this, even if it was not direct help, it did lead me in the right direction.
 
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John Bauer

John Bauer

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Well, that's what we're here for.
 
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Solution
envy14tpe

envy14tpe

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Switching topics is a no no. It's best to PM people if you have a separate question. However, I looked at your link. I haven't experienced what you mentioned so I'm sorry I can't help yah. Keep asking and explaining more to the community.
 
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merk66

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Thanks for posting just to say that. It's always nice to know! I'll be honest, I had to read through the thread to even remember what this was about. Last year I upgraded from Ivy Bridge to Devil's Canyon and that motherboard and chip moved into my wife's desktop pc. I haven't paid attention to how the fans are running on my new motherboard, but maybe I should take a look.
 
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