Most of the major motherboard manufacturers ship their own fan control and temperature monitoring software with their boards, though few have impressed us over the years.

Hardware fan controllers can be purchased but with motherboard control and the availability of low speed fans, they typically aren’t bothered with unless the number of fans involved is extreme they’re also limited in functionality, offering only manual control.ĭynamic control can often be customized right in the BIOS/UEFI and in software so the experience can be tuned properly for real operating conditions. Because of this, physical methods to adjust fan speeds are on the wane. Today, all modern motherboards have some type of control built in with advanced models offering three or more controllable headers. Enthusiasts looked far and wide for low speed replacements or resorted to modifying fan cables with resistors and altering molex connectors to adjust the voltage drop, methods now considered old hat.

In olden times, fan control simply wasn’t offered and all fans operated at maximum full speed. The various chips and processors inside a computer must be cooled, but more often than not, the fans tasked with the job are run at speeds much higher than necessary. Our comprehensive guide walks you through the complex configuration and allows you to unlock the full power of this enduring software utility, a favorite of SPCR for years.Īs fans are responsible for the vast majority of noise generated in modern PCs, fan control is a vital feature in the realm of quiet computing. SpeedFan is a free, but extremely powerful and customizable sensor monitoring and fan control utility that works with a huge range of motherboards.

Speedfan