Fan control out of control! (990FXA-UD3)

[leeoverstreet]

I can't get my CPU fan quiet...

I have a 990FXA-UD3 motherboard with an older AMD Athlon II X4 640 quad-core CPU at stock 3.0 GHz, using stock fan on the CPU FAN header.  Nothing exotic, obviously.  Problem is, I cannot keep the fan speeds down low enough for normal use.  Using the BIOS's "normal" setting, it just runs full blast and is the loudest CPU fan I've ever heard.  Just migraine-inducing.  Changing the setting to "silent" helps significantly when the computer is doing essentially nothing, but any little bit of CPU power draw revs the fan up loud, then back down.  It amounts to every new tab you open in Firefox causing a WHIIRRRRRrrrrr sound.  Not acceptable. 

Loading Easy Tune 6 doesn't help much.  Even going to the Smart tab, and dramatically reducing the fan speed points on the graph barely changes things.  I set it all the way down to 10% (the lowest allowed) for anything up to 50 degrees C, then up to 100% at 62.  This seems to help SLIGHTLY compared to just using "silent" in BIOS.  The CPU fan speed in ET6 shows around 2700 RPM for what I consider a reasonable fan noise, and occasionally will drop below that for a very nice, quiet computer.  However, virtually any activity ramps it up like crazy, even though the CPU temp is nowhere near 50 C!  So clearly ET6 sucks.

On top of all this, ET6 loves to crash for no reason, leaving the CPU fan to fluctuate wildly again.

What gives???  All I want, like most folks, is for the CPU fan to be as quiet as possible until I ask it to do something significant, like encode video, at which point it can go nuts.  Am I doing something wrong?

[leeoverstreet]

May as well reply to my own question.

Long story short, setting the CPU fan control in BIOS to silent and PWM, then installing the latest version of Easy Tune 6 for version 4 of my mobo (released in December 2013) seems to have done the trick.

It's just been throughout the course of today, but Easy Tune 6 no longer seems to be crashing, and the advanced fan control graph (under the Smart tab) behaves in a logical manner.  I have it set to 34% RPM for anything up to 45 C, which has the RPMs at around 1900 at idle, which is quiet enough FINALLY, and the temp at 37 C.  Good enough!  As you do stuff, the RPMs ramp up above 45 C, up to 100% at 61 C, since 62 is the max allowed temp for this CPU.

Maybe that can help someone else.

[dmdilks]

Sorry no body help, But been building a new computer. I have the kind of the same problem on my 990FXA-UD5 - 3.0 board.

The CPU fan is is doing the same thing it will speed up and slow down. I notice that the temp is all over the place too.

I don't like Easy Tune at all. I have never had one that ran right no matter what computer it ran on AMD or Intel.

One of these days I'll look at the heat sink & fan to see if everything is right. It is just my backroom computer don't use it much.

What Rev of the board do you have? They have like 5 of them and do you have the latest Bios too?

 

[leeoverstreet]

I have revision 4, and downloaded the Easy Tune 6 version for that revision.  And over 24 hours later, it's still functioning correctly.  Fan stays quiet when nothing is going on, and the CPU sits at about 39 C.  That's not exactly cool, but it's perfectly safe and I'm happy to let it idle at that speed as long as the fan speeds up as it gets above 45 C.

I have never updated the BIOS for this motherboard.  I bought this motherboard in January 2014, and am using an older CPU from 2010 as I mentioned, so I never saw the need for a BIOS update.

I had a similar problem with a very new Gigabyte Intel board (Z97 chipset) using the new i7-1790K CPU.  For that board, Gigabyte has new "App Center" software that contains the equivalent of Easy Tune and all the other utilities.  It's flashy and useless.  When that software was loaded, the fan speed was too high and all over the place.  When I uninstalled it, the BIOS handled fan speed quietly and properly. 

All this with multiple boards, plus actual INCORRECT answers from official customer service (I asked a question earlier this year to them regarding SATA configurations), PLUS seeing the only official forum here with customers fending for themselves, leads me to consider Asus next time.  :-)

[dmdilks]

I just build this GA-X99-UD4 i7-5820K 3.30GHz, G.Skill 16gb DDR4 2133 Quad. So far is a sweet running computer.

I can sit and it is dead quiet. I don't hear any fans running.I can't say that for my GA-X79-UD4 board.

I have been using Gigabyte board ever since Abit went out. I had a couple I had to send back.

For the most part I have had very good luck. I have used maybe 50 boards. Most people that do have problem with the newer boards.

They are the ones running windows 8 or 8.1. I have run windows 8 & 8.1 but I'll stick with win 7.

[leeoverstreet]

I couldn't agree more about Windows 7.   

[Eazy187]

I have revision 4, and downloaded the Easy Tune 6 version for that revision.  And over 24 hours later, it's still functioning correctly.  Fan stays quiet when nothing is going on, and the CPU sits at about 39 C.  That's not exactly cool, but it's perfectly safe and I'm happy to let it idle at that speed as long as the fan speeds up as it gets above 45 C.

I have never updated the BIOS for this motherboard.  I bought this motherboard in January 2014, and am using an older CPU from 2010 as I mentioned, so I never saw the need for a BIOS update.

I had a similar problem with a very new Gigabyte Intel board (Z97 chipset) using the new i7-1790K CPU.  For that board, Gigabyte has new "App Center" software that contains the equivalent of Easy Tune and all the other utilities.  It's flashy and useless.  When that software was loaded, the fan speed was too high and all over the place.  When I uninstalled it, the BIOS handled fan speed quietly and properly. 

All this with multiple boards, plus actual INCORRECT answers from official customer service (I asked a question earlier this year to them regarding SATA configurations), PLUS seeing the only official forum here with customers fending for themselves, leads me to consider Asus next time.  :-)

ASUS 4 Tha winz

[AgentFXA]

Just get an PWM 120mm cooler/fan and it's fixed