What is a good fan curve

[SircarrotII]

What is a good fan curve for my PC? I want one that is quiet but not too quiet so other components don't overheat. The components to remove heat include a 4000d airflow, a vetroo v5 CPU cooler, and 8 deepcool rf120 fans. All the fans ramping up on the CPU except for the top 2 which ramp up on the PCIe 16x slot. The heat producing components include a 9600k not overclocked but turbo boost is enabled with no limits on the turbo, a Western Digital Blue SN550 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive with a heatsink on it that came from the motherboard, a TP-Link Archer T4E Wi-Fi adapter, a Gigabyte Z390 gaming x motherboard, and 2x8gb sticks of G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory. If you are wondering about cables impeding airflow then here is an image of my cable management. Here is the fan curve I am using now. It is the same for every fan.What is a good fan curve for my PC? I don't know if I went overboard with information or not.`

[FalseControl]

This is all down to preference and no 2 fans are the same. Me personally I run mine at 800 rpm when at idle. I have corsair fans so when a game starts it switches over to my second fan profile which doesn't go below 1500 rpm. Since you are only using 1 fan curve I would set the curve to be low at lower temps and after like idk 60 degrees it starts ramping up. That would be my suggestion but of course that is just my opinion on the matter

[Mark Kaine]

for gpu it's important to have it kick in sooner than later, due to heat built up you end up with lower noise overall.  the default of usually 60c is way too late.

 

i set mine to start at 45c, but that depends on the gpu, if yours idles at 46c for example that would not work. 

Spoiler

 

16 minutes ago, FalseControl said:

Me personally I run mine at 800 rpm when at idle.

my cpu fans idle at 500, intake fans 900, outtake 500, psu 0, but yeah, it depends on the fans too. 

[Alvin853]

I like to match noise levels, so when the CPU or GPU fans ramp up, the case fans also ramp up, there's no point trying to keep the case fans quiet when the GPU fans are going wild, when faster case fans could help the GPU stay cooler. As far as CPU cooler fans go, I usually set them to 100% at 10°C below throttling temp, I'd rather have a noisy PC than throttling or crashing. Some people like to set a lower max speed, I don't get the point of that setup. 

But there is no general "best fan curve", it comes down to personal preference. I'd rather have my CPU sit at 70°C with 40% fan speed than at 60°C with 80% fan speed. Some people don't care about noise, they might have it the other way around. If you're going for a setup where the fans stop during idle, make sure to figure out what your temps without fans will be, or you might end up with a situation where the fans start and stop constantly, which is bad for the motor.

[Mark Kaine]

Just now, Alvin853 said:

I like to match noise levels, so when the CPU or GPU fans ramp up, the case fans also ramp up

thats kind of the point of a fan "curve" yeah.

[Alvin853]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

thats kind of the point of a fan "curve" yeah.

But that usually means, each curve needs to be different. The GPU fans at 50% might be perceived about as loud as the intake fans at 40% and the exhaust at 60%, because the intake fans are closer to the ears. And quite often people only set their case fans to follow the CPU temps, so when the CPU is cold, but the GPU is hot, the case fans don't ramp up.

[Mark Kaine]

45 minutes ago, Alvin853 said:

But that usually means, each curve needs to be different.

yeah, true,  but they all should act "similarly", i guess we agree on that.

 

basically it's impossible to just set and forget, it needs a lot of experimenting at first...

 

my previous point was it doesn't make sense to have them ramp up "gradually", nope, imo there needs to be a cutoff point between silent and performance, with a very short "transition phase"... ie as soon theres a certain load fans should go as fast as is somehow acceptable,  which for my pc is around 40-45c, under that i consider it a low load situation and gpu and psu fans are off for example, cpu fan at 500, intake 800... lower and the pc just keeps heating up doing nothing basically (idle)

 

ie for example:

 

yeah, its a game, but there is almost no load, so fans are relatively low as well, i cant hear the pc at all and im like 10cm away from it .

 

 

but it'll ramp up quickly if there's more load:

Edited May 21, 2022 by Mark Kaine

[Alvin853]

4 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah, true,  but they all should act "similarly", i guess we agree on that.

 

basically it's impossible to just set and forget, it needs a lot of experimenting at first...

 

my previous point was it doesn't make sense to have them ramp up "gradually", nope, imo there needs to be a cutoff point between silent and performance... ie as soon theres a certain load fans should go as fast as is somehow acceptable,  which for my pc is around 40-45c, under that i consider it a low load situation and gpu and psu fans are off for example, cpu fan at 500, intake 800... lower and the pc just keeps heating up doing nothing basically (idle)

If you have the cutoff too sharp, you could get into an oscillating situation, where the load is so high, the fans go into performance, but then the fans cool the system down and it goes back to silent just to start over. A more gradual curve would allow the system to reach equilibrium where you get a (near) constant fan speed. But that's pretty much the only situation where you would want to have a gradual curve, in general you want either maximum cooling or quiet operation like you said. So it depends on the hardware, the cooling setup, and the typical loads, if a situation like that arises.

[Mark Kaine]

28 minutes ago, Alvin853 said:

If you have the cutoff too sharp, you could get into an oscillating situation, where the load is so high, the fans go into performance, but then the fans cool the system down and it goes back to silent just to start over

yup, but that doesn't happen on my system  (it took quite a while to figure out, a "steep" gpu fan curve made the biggest difference,  as well as a noctua cpu cooler, good luck making the stock cooler not annoying  ) 

 

edited with some pics above to make that more clear.

 

ps: i set it like 100% at 90c for all fans... but it never reaches that, typically my system stays around 60-70c max. 

 

if i do a benchmark or something i need to set it manually to 100% for those "cooling bonus points" : D 

 

See?

 

basically all my fans are like that , except i cant set them all to 0 while idling obviously. 

 

Hence you really need to know your idle temp and then give it 10c or so before it ramps up.