finished up building my PC and turned it on and discovered that my heat sink fan wasn't on at all. to tell the truth i was kinda expecting it to be turning (slowly), but still turning. it twitched a little every couple seconds but no full rotations.

i was a little worried especially since the box which the heatsink was in was a little roughed up (took pictures of it just in case) so i plugged in the heatsink that i received (much smaller one) and powered everything up and instead of twitching it would do like one rotation every few seconds which would make sense since its a smaller fan etc.

i called up the motherboard company and they confirmed what i thought, that newer motherboards control the cpu fan and its thermally controlled (makes sense) so it isn't really expected to be running once you turn it on.

currently i just installed windows and my cpu meter hasn't been much over 2% this whole time had it up to like 20-30% for a few minutes since my friend wanted to see the picture quality on a movie.

so how do you test a cpu fan? would like to try before i play any games or anything just to be sure i don't ruin my e8400 dual core. i'm sure its fine im just a little paranoid since this is my first build.

any advice/suggestions? thanks in advance. also if someone could tell me how to access my cpu temp and the temps of my other devices it would be appreciated.

ps got like a bucha fans already directed towards the heatsink so it already probably dissipates quite a bit of heat.

Yes, the fan, if plugged into the headers on the MB, should be spinning. Even PWM controlled fans spin unless you manually disable them.

WHat kind of mobo do you have? Usually, there's more than 1 fan header. You can always plug in the fan into a different fan header on the mobo to test the fan.

The one that is labeled CPU_fan is to monitor and control it through the bios. If you fan isn;t spinning when you boot up your PC, go into the bios, manually override the fan setting to spin at 100% all the time. If it doesn't spin, then there's a problem. Either your fan or the header on the mobo.

Plug the fan into another header, turn on the system and see if it spins. If it spins, then it's a mobo problem. If it doesn;t spin it's a fan.

There is an outside chance that none of the mobo fan headers can work... hey.. I've seen freakier stuff happen in PCs.

If you can, go into the bios and set the fan to run at max. Also like Chookman said try a stress program like Prime95 or Orthos. Monitor your temps with speed fan or core temp while doing so. If your temps exceed 60C in speedfan or ~75C in coretemp without the fan speed increasing to compensate then you have a MoBo problem.