Connecting the fans does not end the work on cooling the desktop computer, you still need to adjust the fan speeds. In this article we will show you how.
After describing the different positions of the fans, measuring the effect on temperatures and explaining the mounting of the fans in practice, we will now focus on the last step, which is the setting of the speed of the fans. We will tell you how to proceed, whether you need special programs to control the fan speed at all, and what to watch out for.
At the very beginning, you have to ask yourself whether you want to tune the fans only for quiet operation, only for performance, or make a compromise where the computer will be quiet under minimal load, but you want to get the most out of it under load, which will also affect the noise level. You should think about this already when buying fans, or during their assembly, when you can use LNA resistors to reduce noise and performance through hardware.
Fan curve
The fan can be set in two ways, the first is to set a fixed speed that will never change. For example, you can set the fans on the processor cooler to full speed, ensuring low temperatures and maximum performance. In practice, however, this is not used, because there is a more sophisticated, albeit slightly more complicated, solution available.
Ideally, you want to use a curve to adjust the RPMs based on temperature. In the attached picture you can see how such a curve can look like. On the horizontal axis are the temperatures (typically of the processor), mostly from zero to one hundred degrees Celsius. The vertical axis shows the fan speed in percent. The ideal curve looks like the performance of the fans gradually increases with temperature.
Here you might say that in that case there must be a single correct curve that everyone should set and it will be taken care of. But unfortunately that is not true. First of all, each fan has its own characteristics and is otherwise noisy at different speeds. Another aspect is the fact that fans are far from precise regulation and speed measurement. In practice, even two completely identical fans can differ by as much as 10% in their real speed for the same percentage of power. There is no universal advice and everyone has to adjust the fans according to themselves and according to the specific components of the computer. So let’s get to it.
Source: pctuning.cz
