How are YOU controlling your case fans in 2019?

[grangervoldemort]

I last built a PC in 2012; the specs of which can be seen in my sig.

 

I will be doing a new build.

 

I want to know how modern new cases/mobos are controlling fans or are people using a fan controller?

I see cases like the BeQuiet 700 Pro and NZXT 700i have their own auto fan controllers; BUT the NZXT's one was reviewed to be useless and I doubt any case fan controller boards that cases seem to come with nowadays, fare any better.

 

I also notice mobos, even the £300+ ones do not have enough PWM fan controller headers to be able to control all the case fans a modern case has.

 

So how are you all doing it?

 

NO WATERCOOLING SETUPS please. ONLY air cooled.

[Princess Luna]

All my fans are connected straight to the motherboard headers and I just use the BIOS to set up the fan curve.

[For Science!]

Straight to motherboard, set to react to a T_Sensor i have monitoring my coolant temperature in BIOS. No fan controller, imo unnecessary in 2019.

[grangervoldemort]

2 minutes ago, For Science! said:

Straight to motherboard, set to react to a T_Sensor i have monitoring my coolant temperature in BIOS. No fan controller, imo unnecessary in 2019.

What is a T sensor. How many fans do you have in your case?

[For Science!]

2 minutes ago, grangervoldemort said:

What is a T sensor. How many fans do you have in your case?

6 Fans, t_sensor is a 2-pin header found on a lot of Asus motherboard (I believe another vendor also does them) that I use to plug in a water temperature sensor in my custom loop. This is how I get my fans to react to the fluid temperature instead of component temperatures allowing for smoother transitions and prevent unnecessary spikes in fan speed due to component temp spikes.

[nick name]

Since ASUS mobos shoot fan speed up to 100% at 75*C I use a Noctua controller to control my Noctua 3000 RPM fans.  

[Guest]

I use Corsair Commander Pros in my high fan count builds, mobos + splitter (if needed) in everything else. 

[grangervoldemort]

1 minute ago, nick name said:

Since ASUS mobos shoot fan speed up to 100% at 75*C I use a Noctua controller to control my Noctua 3000 RPM fans.  

Can you explain why 100% speed is an issue at that temp? I don't know enough about speeds and temps. WHICH fan controller do you use exactly. Link please.

[grangervoldemort]

3 minutes ago, Den-Fi said:

I use Corsair Commander Pros in my high fan count builds, mobos + splitter (if needed) in everything else. 

Can you please explain this better.

Also is the way you do it quiet even when under load?

[karsnoordhuis]

speedfan although it does not work the way i want it to. the official asus software for my mobo does not go up to win10 (its a p6t se) so its a bit of 20% 100% 0% 100% 20% 50%.

[grangervoldemort]

Just now, karsnoordhuis said:

speedfan although it does not work the way i want it to. the official asus software for my mobo does not go up to win10 (its a p6t se) so its a bit of 20% 100% 0% 100% 20% 50%.

Modern builds only please. Also please explain better when you do reply. Why the random percent figures.

[karsnoordhuis]

1 minute ago, grangervoldemort said:

Modern builds only please. Also please explain better when you do reply. Why the random percent figures.

that randomness it what my fan speed is, bit annoying. its not a nice curve. jumps all over the place

 

[Olaf6541]

I couldnt find what i was looking for so i decided to make my own fan controller with an arduino:

 

[Exotath]

I use a commander pro for my case fans and fans on my gpu (morpheus II) which is a mix of Noctua Chromax fans and LL140's. For my NHU12A I use the motherboard header. Overall I've been pretty happy with the commander pro. It had some kinks in the beginning with software and I had to RMA it once cause it died randomly but all in all it is a solid product.

 

Previously when I had watercooling I used a swiftech 8x pwm fan hub connected to my motherboard fan header and used the bios fan curve to control it.

[SolarNova]

13 fans.

Connected via various splitters to my motherboard (P9x79 Pro), controlled via the terrible Asus AI suite II & FanXpert. Its bad but it does the job. Keeps fans at ~1000 rpm. With a jump to max speed should temps hit 73c+. Kinda of a audible warning system should my system for some reason start getting to hot. it never does . Would prefer to set the temp higher but the software is so limited it wont allow it.

 

Would prefer using a bay mounted fan controller tbh, but none of the ones available can handle that many fans controlled individually, I would have to buy multiple units , and that gets very expensive for something as simple as a fan controller.

[DildorTheDecent]

Lamptron FC5V3 (6 channel 30W per channel fan controller). DRP4 + case fans are plugged into it.

 

It'll go unused if I upgrade and downsize. Shame since it's been very good.

[Guest]

35 minutes ago, grangervoldemort said:

Can you please explain this better.

Also is the way you do it quiet even when under load?

In my main build, I have 9 HD120s connected to 2 Corsair Commander Pros. All fans run at 860~ RPMs idle and 1100~ under load. Though sometimes for my own peace of mind I max them out since my music is always louder than the fans. Definitely wouldn't class it as a silent build. I don't think that's possible with 9 fans that aren't built for silence.

 

I do have a Redux build with 6x 140mm and 2x 92mm Noctuas that is really quiet, but Redux don't move a ton of air.

[grangervoldemort]

3 minutes ago, Den-Fi said:

In my main build, I have 9 HD120s connected to 2 Corsair Commander Pros. All fans run at 860~ RPMs idle and 1100~ under load. Though sometimes for my own peace of mind I max them out since my music is always louder than the fans. Definitely wouldn't class it as a silent build. I don't think that's possible with 9 fans that aren't built for silence.

 

I do have a Redux build with 6x 140mm and 2x 92mm Noctuas that is really quiet, but Redux don't move a ton of air.

What is a Redux?

[nick name]

47 minutes ago, grangervoldemort said:

Can you explain why 100% speed is an issue at that temp? I don't know enough about speeds and temps. WHICH fan controller do you use exactly. Link please.

It's an issue at that temp because that temp is not very high.  So I'd prefer my fans not spin up to 3000 RPM (which is very loud) at 75*C.  I do occasionally run them full speed when benchmarking, but not for daily use.  

 

Controller is the Noctua NA FC1.  

[Guest]

1 minute ago, grangervoldemort said:

What is a Redux?

https://noctua.at/en/products/product-lines/line-redux

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

On my main rig I daisy-chained a couple of 3-way PWM splitters so I can run all my fans (2 BeQuiet SW2 CPU fans and 3 Noctua NF-A14 PWM case fans) from the CPU header. 

The fan curve only starts to go up at 40°C while the CPU idles in the low 30s.  This means that all the fans idle along when I'm just browsing or playing music, but ramp up as soon as I put any serious load on the CPU. 

As soon as a process starts to eat resources for no reason or a site tries to use my CPU cycles to mine Monero, I'll hear that something's going on.

 

The reason is part necessity, part laziness.  My motherboard supports PWM only on the CPU fan header, all the other headers only do voltage control despite having 4 pins.  So when I installed those PWM fans I had to get my signal from either the CPU header or a fan controller.  I was too lazy to look into 4-pin fan controllers that were linux-compatible, so I decided to hook everything up to the CPU header.  Problem solved cheaply and quickly. 

 

 

 

My secondary rig uses stock Fractal 3-pin fans, so I hooked those up to the regular case fan headers on the motherboard. 

I set that one up to react to the CPU temperature as well, but because those 3-pin fans idle at 50% speed instead of the 12.5% that PWM fans can do, I only let them go beyond idle when the temp hits 50°C. 

 

 

 

The NAS uses a Lamptron FC5v2 fan controller to control 6 BeQuiet SW2 3-pin fans. 

[Zberg]

All fans straight to mobo headers, fans set to maximum in bios.  Barely audible in the define R6.  Easy peezy

[spat55]

6 hours ago, DildorTheDecent said:

Lamptron FC5V3 (6 channel 30W per channel fan controller). DRP4 + case fans are plugged into it.

 

It'll go unused if I upgrade and downsize. Shame since it's been very good.

I'm thinking about buying the DRP4 for my 3700x the only issue is I want to be able to remove my GPU without having to remove the cooler first

[grangervoldemort]

2 hours ago, Zberg said:

All fans straight to mobo headers, fans set to maximum in bios.  Barely audible in the define R6.  Easy peezy

Please state fans rather than making people read through the small text in your sig. Thanks. At 100% I would expect any fans to be audible. Did you use the fans that came with the case? How many fans do you have?

[DildorTheDecent]

1 hour ago, spat55 said:

I'm thinking about buying the DRP4 for my 3700x the only issue is I want to be able to remove my GPU without having to remove the cooler first

Yeah it's tight.

 

The cooler is great though.