Years ago when I was choosing the parts for my former win7 3D workstation, I wanted to prevent any heat problems caused by the rendering process.
I got myself the Cooler Master: HAF X which is looking pretty dope and really does the job. The workstation is far from getting warm at any time.
However I’m pretty annoyed by the constant noise by now. In the following I’ll explain how I solved this by using lm_sensors on arch.
As described in ArchWiki you can use lm_sensons to control the fans of your machine. The very first thing you want to do is checking if your chip is supported. See http://www.lm-sensors.org/wiki/Devices
Install lm_sensors as usual via:
|
1 |
sudo pacman -S lm_sensors |
Calling sensors displays the current temperature of the several cores among other things.
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 |
coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 0: +39.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 1: +37.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 2: +39.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 3: +39.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) nouveau-pci-0200 Adapter: PCI adapter fan1: 3420 RPM temp1: +30.0°C (high = +95.0°C, hyst = +3.0°C) (crit = +105.0°C, hyst = +5.0°C) (emerg = +135.0°C, hyst = +5.0°C) |
Yet it didn’t show any info about the case fans contrary to my expectations. Hence I ran:
|
1 |
sudo sensors-detect |
I followed the instructions of the guide in the wiki to set up an according config file:
|
1 |
sudo pwmconfig |
The tool queries quite a lot. I was sticking to the defaults most of the time, since I’m not exactly an expert in this field.
Once the file has been created you should be able to observe changes when calling the following. You may want to capture the effects in a simple text file to have some kind of proof.
|
1 2 3 4 |
sensors > without_fancontrol sudo fancontrol sensors > with_fancontrol diff without_fancontrol with_fancontrol |
At least one fan slowed down noticeably resulting in less noise.
|
1 2 3 4 5 |
< fan1: 1950 RPM < fan2: 1118 RPM --- > fan1: 1347 RPM > fan2: 1121 RPM |
As a last step I set up fancontrol to be run as a service at startup:
|
1 |
sudo systemctl enable fancontrol |
You can easily verify that it’s running after a reboot by:
|
1 |
systemctl status fancontrol |
Thanks again to the awesome ArchWiki!