FanControl, my take on a SpeedFan replacement

[Rem0o]

11 hours ago, Raviehn said:

Any ideas how to fix that? Is something off with the graph curves? Did i fail to get a important restriction?

Could you send your config file (json) ?

[DeSinc]

just wanna say thanks for making the fractional percentage controls. I can set exactly what I want it to do now even without sacrificing the granularity of the sub-percent values. they work great.

 

I noticed a small visual bug you may like to know about: before, I would often click and drag a point all the way over to the point next to it to push it up against it so they are right next to each other, for example so point 1 is at 50C and point 2 would be at 51C etc. Before, it would stop moving point 2 once it "collided" with point 1. now you can simply move the point beyond it and it goes haywire with the graph like so:

 

 

not a big issue just a visual bug it seems, but could maybe cause confusion I suppose.

[DeSinc]

also, perhaps more importantly, just another bug report about using the HWinfo sensors plugin.

 

after you did the change to show an error and max fans that have N/A sensor data, this breaks using HWinfo sensors because at boot the HWinfo plugin takes a very long time to fully initialise all sensors and FanControl keeps on throwing errors non stop until they all finish loading. in my experience it takes longer than 30 seconds after fancontrol has loaded for HWinfo to fully run through all the sensors. this means the user must sit there clicking ok, refresh sensors, ok, refresh sensors, for 30+ sec until HWinfo sensors are finally all responding. while doing this you can see with the FanControl error which sensors are being found one by one.

 

perhaps at bootup, give the sensors a full minute leeway before erroring out? I doubt anyone is going to overheat their PC in 1 minute after they boot so it really shouldn't be that big a concern, but I trust you to think of a better solution anyway. @Rem0o

[Rem0o]

@DeSinc

Good catch on the graph point, yeah it's only an animation/visual issue, doesn't affect the actual underlying graph points.

As for the HWInfo thing and start up delay, I added that field a variety of reasons 


Increase it until it's a non-issue.

[MatsNorway]

Worked like a charm right away, only thing i can not controll properly is GPU fans on my 6900XT but radeon software got that covered, sorta, ish.. 

 

I was also able to determine that the rear fan is not really performing even tho it spins. So i bought a Noctua for the rear.

 

Edit: oh and you probably want to turn of dark mode or something to see the icon like i do. Because that fan icon is invisible with a gray/white task bar.

And the name, you need to name the thing something non generic.

[Rem0o]

On 11/8/2021 at 1:17 PM, MatsNorway said:

And the name, you need to name the thing something non generic.

You are definitely not the first person to mention the name, and you're right, terrible for SEO.

Might have to start a poll or something.

I thought about OnlyFans, or FanHub, but somebody told me those names are too hot for a software meant to cool PCs.

[WhitetailAni]

@Rem0o This tool works on my ASUS ROG Strix B350-F Gaming, thanks for this! My BIOS fan control settings are hopelessly confusing.

[Rem0o]

New feature in V96, select your sensor sources. Turn off everything you don't need for lower CPU usage, or if you encounter errors with some categories. You can also see which Plugins are active or not.

Some things to note for Nvidia users: NvApiWrapper is much more CPU-friendly than the GPU implementation in LHM for Nvidia GPUs. However, NvAPIWrapper does not sees the HotSpot sensor, where the implementation in LHM does. Choose one or the other for Nvidia GPUs.

[DeSinc]

4 hours ago, Rem0o said:

New feature in V96, select your sensor sources. Turn off everything you don't need for lower CPU usage, or if you encounter errors with some categories. You can also see which Plugins are active or not.

Some things to note for Nvidia users: NvApiWrapper is much more CPU-friendly than the GPU implementation in LHM for Nvidia GPUs. However, NvAPIWrapper does not sees the HotSpot sensor, where the implementation in LHM does. Choose one or the other for Nvidia GPUs.

might I suggest leaving 1 or 2 previous versions available for download on the github page? I don't have access to a copy of version 95 which I think I need to go back to for the moment as there are some issues with 96:

 

hysteresis doesn't appear to be working at all (fans simply go on and off with no care for the setting)

program sometimes crashes with no error when setting points. might not be related but I was setting them very close together using the + - option to fine tune it to an 0.1 gap.

unticking one of the sensors in the new setting menu broke all of my sensors (seemingly permanently??) and now they are all renamed with all offsets and start/stop values deleted. (running a previous version doesn't fix this sadly but just mentioning it as surely these settings are still saved somewhere right?)

[Rem0o]

1 hour ago, DeSinc said:

hysteresis doesn't appear to be working at all (fans simply go on and off with no care for the setting)

Hysteresis on the fan curves? Didn't change any of that, and just tested it to be sure, it still works?

 

Quote

unticking one of the sensors in the new setting menu broke all of my sensors (seemingly permanently??) 

Well yes, if you untick stuff that was used in your config, like your motherboard sensors, it will break your config. That stuff is really not meant to be played on and off.
If you lost your config, just go to file history in Windows and pick it back up. It saved me a couple of times.

[DeSinc]

2 hours ago, Rem0o said:

Hysteresis on the fan curves? Didn't change any of that, and just tested it to be sure, it still works?

haha, I think I found out what the issue is. If your fans are set to have a max rising speed of the default 8%, the fan appears to be spinning up at the "start" value of the fan (for my fan is 45%) and then going back to 0% briefly for some reason and then rising up to the actual value from 0. when the speed rise rate is only set to 8% it seems to not work, maybe because it would take over 5 seconds to get to my 42% minimum so it never makes it in time before the fan just switches off? although my offset is already set to 42% so it shouldn't even be hanging anywhere near 0%, so I dunno if that theory is right.

 

anyway I managed to fix this by setting the fan ramp-up speed to 50% and it makes it every time, but if it's any lower it just fails to get there and stalls at 0% and tries again over and over for some reason. point is this doesn't happen on earlier versions, something changed in v96. this also is affecting my other fans so I've had to set all of them to have 50% ramp-up speed to stop them from turning on-and-off.

 

 

Version 94: straight lines for ON and OFF on the left of the graph.

Version 96: jagged on-off on the right side.

 

the momentary straight line on the right is where I figured out the trick of raising the fan ramp-speed from 8% default up to 50%.

[mr_rambling]

Just downloaded and installed FanControl v96, but I'm having trouble getting it to detect my Lian Li SL120 fans. Got them connected via the LL hub to the CPU_FAN connector.

Running a Hero VIII mobo, pump and the seperate Noctua fan are being controlled great. Has anyone else encountered this issue?

[Alvin853]

18 hours ago, mr_rambling said:

Just downloaded and installed FanControl v96, but I'm having trouble getting it to detect my Lian Li SL120 fans. Got them connected via the LL hub to the CPU_FAN connector.

Running a Hero VIII mobo, pump and the seperate Noctua fan are being controlled great. Has anyone else encountered this issue?

Make sure you set the fans to PWM mode in the L-Connect software:

Then they should be controlled by whatever mainboard header you have the hub connected to. 

 

But I don't know, if the LL hub reports the fan speed back to the mainboard, so FanControl might not be able to show the speed. I have my Lian Li fans only hooked up to the hub for RGB and the fan speed connectors are plugged directly into the mainboard. 

[mr_rambling]

8 hours ago, Alvin853 said:

Make sure you set the fans to PWM mode in the L-Connect software:

Then they should be controlled by whatever mainboard header you have the hub connected to. 

 

But I don't know, if the LL hub reports the fan speed back to the mainboard, so FanControl might not be able to show the speed. I have my Lian Li fans only hooked up to the hub for RGB and the fan speed connectors are plugged directly into the mainboard. 

Ended up just moving the fan headers to the mobo, that seems to work now, thanks for the help.

[eks]

Thanks Rem0o. Downloaded and using this now.

Plugin support was exactly what i needed, wrote my own for use with my custom usb sensor to monitor coolant temperature.

Now I'm going to go try make a controller for use with this and call it FanController.

 

BTW minor bug but checkbox in sensor settings for storage doesn't like being turned off.

It comes and goes as it pleases after restarting the software.

[DeSinc]

 

On 11/9/2021 at 4:20 PM, DeSinc said:

haha, I think I found out what the issue is. If your fans are set to have a max rising speed of the default 8%, the fan appears to be spinning up at the "start" value of the fan (for my fan is 45%) and then going back to 0% briefly for some reason and then rising up to the actual value from 0. when the speed rise rate is only set to 8% it seems to not work, maybe because it would take over 5 seconds to get to my 42% minimum so it never makes it in time before the fan just switches off? although my offset is already set to 42% so it shouldn't even be hanging anywhere near 0%, so I dunno if that theory is right.

 

anyway I managed to fix this by setting the fan ramp-up speed to 50% and it makes it every time, but if it's any lower it just fails to get there and stalls at 0% and tries again over and over for some reason. point is this doesn't happen on earlier versions, something changed in v96. this also is affecting my other fans so I've had to set all of them to have 50% ramp-up speed to stop them from turning on-and-off.

 

 

Version 94: straight lines for ON and OFF on the left of the graph.

Version 96: jagged on-off on the right side.

  

the momentary straight line on the right is where I figured out the trick of raising the fan ramp-speed from 8% default up to 50%.

@Rem0o actually my "fix" of turning fan increase rate up to max 50% didn't work it turns out. looks like it was just a temporary fluke but now it's doing the start-stop thing again as seen in the above picture. I'll attach my json as I think you said it helped you last time just in case you need it to see what's going on.

 

a20211109_afterSensorScrewup.json

 

another problem that is being caused is when I set the fan to 100% while it has an offset value, if the combined % + offset value adds up to OVER 100% total, it will make the fan go 100% - 0% - 100% - 0% and keep turning on and off rapidly, with the end result of barely spinning the fan up at all. this almost bricked my card, lucky I heard the fan not ramping up right and came back to investigate before I left it for 3 hours at 120c mem temps!!

 

setting the fan offset + fan speed percent to add up to 100% causes the fan to correctly spin at 100%. (in my case for example: offset of 42% means I had to set the fan speed to 58% in manual mode to get it to run at 100%. if I set the manual control any higher while the offset was still set, it would keep resetting the fan to 0% repeatedly.

 

this should be easy to reproduce I hope. none of these problems seem to happen on v94.

(edit: just found the prior releases section on the github, silly me - off to get v95 again)

 

thanks for all your hard work!

[Goodspede]

This might be a bit of a dumb question, but I am guessing that if I have all my PWM fans plugged into a single hub, and that hub is plugged into a fan header on the MOBO, Fan Control will only see them all as 1 fan?

[DeSinc]

25 minutes ago, Goodspede said:

This might be a bit of a dumb question, but I am guessing that if I have all my PWM fans plugged into a single hub, and that hub is plugged into a fan header on the MOBO, Fan Control will only see them all as 1 fan?

correct, that's how I had mine set up for a short while. it sees it as a single fan and one thing you should note is that if they are different fans it can sometimes mean that their start/stop speeds do not line up correctly so only one fan will start at something like 25%, and the other fan will only start at 45%, or something like that. otherwise if they are the exact same spec and model fans then they should start and stop all at the same percent speeds and act as one fan. you may or may not get any RPM read-out however. I certainly couldn't make it work when plugged into my hub.

 

also, version 97 looking good. fixed the 100% fan speed issue and seemingly the starting and stopping issue too. (yet to see it happen but I assume it's fixed with the start/stop bug)

(edit: start-stop bug still happening) it should be running at minimum speed for a hysteresis of 2c, but it just does this instead:

[Goodspede]

Just now, DeSinc said:

correct, that's how I had mine set up for a short while. it sees it as a single fan and one thing you should note is that if they are different fans it can sometimes mean that their start/stop speeds do not line up correctly so only one fan will start at something like 25%, and the other fan will only start at 45%, or something like that. otherwise if they are the exact same spec and model fans then they should start and stop all at the same percent speeds and act as one fan. you may or may not get any RPM read-out however. I certainly couldn't make it work when plugged into my hub.

Thanks for the clarification. I guess it sucks for me as I only really have 1 fan header. I was hoping to separate some fans (a group dedicated to GPU temps and another group to overall chassis exhaust), but I'll take it as it is.

[NJoe]

7 hours ago, Goodspede said:

Thanks for the clarification. I guess it sucks for me as I only really have 1 fan header. I was hoping to separate some fans (a group dedicated to GPU temps and another group to overall chassis exhaust), but I'll take it as it is.

Well, I guess you can always get yourself a external fan controller (e.g. a Corsair CommanderPro or NZXT Grid+ V3). They both should give you at least 4 independent fan channels.

 

Even cheaper and more fun -- at least if you are not scared away by having to do some soldering on your own -- would be to build a cheap fan controller yourself. I have this one based on an Arduino Nano and run it with 4 temperature channels and 4 fan channels.

[tenuis]

Hi @Rem0o! I just noticed that after updating to V96 and V97, my NZXT Kraken water temp sensor and pump speed both disappeared. The app says the sensors are missing on launch.

I rolled back to V95 and everything is back to normal, so I guess it comes from the updated Libre Hardware Monitor driver in V96.

 

I checked the latest Libre Hardware Monitor release (0.8.9) and both are correctly displayed.

 

Do you need a log file or anything for troubleshooting?

 

The identifier is "/nzxt/krakenx3/1A/temperature/0" (and two other variants for "fan" and control)

 

[Rem0o]

@tenuis

[tenuis]

Haha, completely missed this, thanks, everything is perfect again!

 

And thanks again for your work, it's awesome

[Levent]

Is it possible/feasible for you to add RAM utilization based fan controls? My DIMMs don't have temperature sensors BUT they require active cooling due to how high I overclocked them. Even RAM usage percentage as a "temperature" input would work.

[MatsNorway]

I suddenly could not get the front fans to slow down. I think i might have updated the software, i ended up disconnecting the fans from the fanheader thingy Fractal gives you and now everything works flawlessly again. Thought you might want to hear about that oddity. It did not happen on current release as i just updated. But it might persist.