[SOLVED] Cooling advice - PWM Hub, Bios fan curves for silent(ish) case

[SpinningFan]

My current setup: Phanteks Enthoo Pro case, 200mm front fan, 120mm back fan and two 140mm top fans. The front and back fans are Phanteks fans, quite silent and the two top I added are Corsair 140mm fans, pretty loud when spinning at more than 800rpm. Without the fans, I thought my Ryzen 3600 is a tad bit too hot when idling (often sitting around 50C) and I thought it's a good idea to have more fans.

The case has a PWM hub. PWM Hub connects to the CPU_OPT, the front 200mm fan connects to the FAN1 header (on the hub), others connect to the other headers (on the hub). CPU cooler fan (tower air cooler 212 EVO) connects to the CPU_FAN.

In bios there are two curves that are directly controlled by the temperatures and/or me (via tweaking the curves).

First of all, I set both CPU and OPT to be managed by the PWM hub. Previously it was set to "auto" and that made all case fans spin up at max speed, all the time (sounds like a jet!).

When idling in bios, CPU temp is around 33, so I can't really judge the noise levels, because at that temperature, not much airflow is needed (even if I bring the case fan curve down the temperature doesn't go up).

However when I boot to windows and start browsing, or doing anything really, the CPU does this: first, 33C. Case fans spin down to around 700 rpm (nice quiet mode). CPU starts to heat up. Fans catch up, but whenever it goes past 800 rpm, the noise not tolerable. Occasionally, opening another window, switching between programs, opening a HW monitoring software etc. causes the CPU to reach even more than 50C and that's when the fans get annoyingly loud at ~1000rpm.

Now, I know that I can't expect this to run cool AND quiet while playing games, but in just browsing situations I would expect it to be quiet and cool.

I tried to set the CPU fan curve a bit higher, because the CPU fan is not that loud. The case fans curve is a bit lower, but as I mentioned earlier, it has these cool - spin down - hot spin up cycles that are annoying. Should I ignore the threat and set the case fan curve so it doesn't end at the max RPM (or it does but only at some ridiculous temperature like 100C), or suck it up and get good big headphones...?

Maybe I connected it in a way I was not supposed to, but the manual mentioned that the "main" case fan should be connected to the FAN1 header and I assumed that would be the front fan (it also came with the front fan already connected to the FAN1 header so I thought that's the way it's supposed to be). It also said that the PWM hub should be connected to CPU_FAN, but I felt like that can be dangerous and that the CPU fan should have its very own header on the motherboard, so that's why I connected the hub to CPU_OPT.

 

[SpinningFan]

I should also mention that I found two more headers on the motherboard: Sys fan1 and 2, so I can plug something there and control it separately. More options, but what's the best route?

 

[SpinningFan]

I solved it by rewiring the fans as follows:

front 200mm fan into sys_fan1, "aggressive curve", but since it's already a low rpm fan running quiet, I just want it to be pushing air inside as much as possible, at all times.
rear 120mm fan into sys_fan2 with a reasonable curve depending on the CPU temp
two top fans into the PWM hub which connects to the CPU_OPT with very mild curve. My bios doesn't let me set the rightmost point (highest temperature) to anything less than 100% RPM so I moved this point all the way to the right and made the rest of the points pretty low. Even at ~600 RPM it pushes A LOT of air from the case.

The CPU is already running cooler when idling and browsing! However, it still tends to oscillate, but now only between 30C and 40C, which is, I guess okay. Bonus? Pretty quiet system

The only thing I'm concerned about is the front fan: is it gonna hurt it and wear it out very fast if I run it at at least 70% of the max RPM all the time? This case is strange in a way, I can't add another front fan.