Fans ramping up and down on GA7PESH2

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1

All,

I recently ended up turning my anniversary build from primary server into homelab. As such, it is now within earshot in my office not stuffed down in the basement. Therefore fan control is now important.

I purchased a pair of Gammaxx 400 CPU coolers to replace a pair of EVGA AIOs I was using with noisy, whiny pumps. The air cooling is working perfectly until it isn’t.

The default fan noise is perfectly acceptable on the “balanced” setting in the fan control settings of the BIOS. However every minute or two I get blasted by the fans turning up to full power for about 5-10 seconds before returning to normal. CPU temps during this time according to IPMItool remain stable at around 30c.

I’ve noticed that IPMI sees the CPU fans running at 800RPM as a warning, as does ESXI. Not sure if this is the cause… I also tried a few hints found online of changing PWM values in BIOS to 160 and many variants besides but I still get the ramping up and down.

What’s my best solution here? Use the built-in fan controller for my case and eschew any motherboard connections? Or can it be reliably controlled through the BIOS?

2

I personally don’t have this motherboard but ran into a similar situation a couple of years back. I wound up buying this controller and setting the fan speeds individually (yes, nice that it could do that) to a balanced set of settings so there would no revving up of the fans. It’s not the cheapest but I’m sure there are more cost effective options out there if you do a little research:

https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Fan-Controller-Commander-CL-9011110-WW/dp/B0725HP1J2/

Now I just need a good 1500VA pure sine UPS to protect against the God forsaken power and lightning strikes in Cary, NC!

3

LOL I have that exact same controller I got on a Black Friday deal somewhere. I’ll just set everything to a constant RPM, I can handle white noise but changing fan noise? NOPE.

Also, hi! I live up in North Raleigh. Would be cool to have a beer sometime.

4

I wrote up how to get the Commander Pro working under Linux. Last time I looked it was Windows only so this was a really pleasant surprise!

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