*That’s not my terminal output btw, so don’t strain your eyes trying to read it, lol. It is the fancontrol tool that I used though.
After installing Pop OS, my fans have been running super high, and I had no idea why that changed. My fan curves in my BIOS haven’t changed (I even lowered it to “silent” mode), and my temps are low. After a long time messing around with the fancontrol tool, I somehow made it worse, so I uninstalled fancontrol and am just dealing with it. I think it must have been my Corsair software on windows that was keeping my fans running at reasonable speeds before, and without it, it reverts back to my BIOS controls. Oh well, it’s not that big of a deal, but it did inspire me to make a meme out of it.
Any beginner’s guides for this? I hadn’t thought about it until now but my fans do seem louder since I switched from Windows!
It depends on your BIOS, but most motherboards have some way to manage your fans.
For example, mine looks similar to this screenshot. You just set the curves how you want based on temp:
ayyy, that’s what my Strix X99 UEFI looks like
Honestly the presets are pretty good. Normal is a good balance of speed and noise, silence is good for silence, and high performance just blasts them.
Find your average CPU temperature in game, and your average temperature at idle/low load. You’ll want it at or near 100% speed in games, and you’ll want it near the bottom at idle. If the temp difference is too small and it’s almost a vertical line then expect to hear fans ramp up and down a lot. So it’s a balancing act after those initial settings.
Most importantly you want hysteresis. Hysteresis prevents your fans from ramping up and down every single polling cycle and kinda averages it out. Fan speed changing bothers me more than hearing the fans, so I set a long 5-10 second hysteresis for my main case fans. For the CPU fan it’s a bit shorter, but they’re Noctuas so I can’t hear em.