Question MB Fan running constantly 100% at ±4500RPM, can't change

[BlackSheepZA]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is in the wrong place. I chose the components for my computer and had the company put it together for me. When I first started it, I noticed that it was quite noisy at first, but didn't think much off it at the time, I was just excited to have a new computer which was a vast improvement over my old one. To date I haven't done any tweaking to anything, apart from looking at the fans in the BIOS, Corsair iCue and Gigabyte SIV.

Components

Gigabyte Z390 Ultra
i7-8700k
Corsair H115i Platinum
Gigabyte RTX2080
Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO RAM
Corsair RM750x PSU
3x Corsair LL120 case fans
Fractal Meshify C Case

Now for the part that confuses me. According to following screenshots, you can see that the fan is running constantly at high RPM, and it cannot be changed. I tried changing it in the BIOS and SIV with no difference at all.





Below is the CPU Fan header, I presume that is connected correctly, but sadly my knowledge isn't that great with internal components and various connections.



At the end of the day, I can accept the fan noise, I'm just curious as to whether there is anything that I can do to control the fan RPM.

Thanks to everything in advance, hopefully I will be able to increase my knowledge and decrease noise levels!

 

[Giobumang]

It could be the fans on your radiator, I just installed a water cooler myself and noticed the fans were very loud so I downloaded the companys software and turned it down from there. Now I can barely hear anything.

 

[BlackSheepZA]

Hi Giobumang, I have tried playing with the fans in iCue, I turned both radiator fans off, as well as the 3 LL120 fans off, and it made no difference at all. I will be honest, I don't even know where the fan running at 4500RPM is. I'm sure the answer is staring at me blatantly, and I will feel stupid when I figure it out.

 

[Giobumang]

Hi Giobumang, I have tried playing with the fans in iCue, I turned both radiator fans off, as well as the 3 LL120 fans off, and it made no difference at all. I will be honest, I don't even know where the fan running at 4500RPM is. I'm sure the answer is staring at me blatantly, and I will feel stupid when I figure it out.

Hmm definitely weird! Maybe its the fans installed in the front your case unless those are the LL120 fans

 

[Blackink]

I don't know if iCue is the same as Q-Fan control but when I updated my Asus Z-97 Bios the other day, after the successful update, I noticed my fans were running at a much higher speed than before and this was before any basic over clocking, which I had done before.
I tried going into the manual fan tuning, which is available in the EZ Mode, but it hardly made a difference and the fan speed adjustments wouldn't go down low enough in the graph for my liking.
I started looking in the Advanced mode (F7), on my mobo and saw Qfan Control(F6) along the top of the screen for selections. I selected that and it brought me to a screen where I could actually adjust the fan speeds to my liking. Once I turned the fan speeds down, everything was back to normal and my mobo & CPU temps stayed the same.

I would look around in the Advanced section of your mobo BIOS and see if there is something like what I have, the Q-Fan Control, and see if you can make your adjustments there. Unless QFan is the same as iCue, if that's the case, it sounds like you've found the similar settings for fan speed adjustments that I have on my Asus mobo.

 

[Karadjgne]

The ML Pro fans on that H115i Platinum are rated upto 2000rpm.
You aren't looking at the fans speed, you'll need to go through iCue for that, what SmartFan is reading is the speed of what's actually plugged into the cpu_fan header, which is the pump. But being different software it's entirely likely it's going to read it wrong. Conflicting software.

If you look down on the iCue page it lists pump speed and fan... speed, which is more accurate.

You are trying to set up conflicting stuff. If using the iCue for the aio, disable the SmartFan or set cpu_fan header for 100% and forget about it.

It's a case of can't have both at the same time.

 

[BlackSheepZA]

Hi Karadjgne,

Thanks for the helpful reply, I normally only run Corsair iCue. At first I was trying to figure out if the noise levels of my PC were possibly from the LL120 fans mounted on the top and back, not having the Corsair Commander Pro, I had to use the BIOS or SmartFan utility in order to control the RPM, and that's when I found out that those fans are near-silent. During my testing, I made sure that iCue wasn't running, I tend not to run the conflicting software at the same time.

I didn't think that the RPM readings for the Pump and Fan#1 would be different, but I tried setting the Pump in the Corsair software to Quiet, noted the Fan#1 RPM, then set the Pump to the max, and noted the change.

At the end of the day, I guess the noise level is just the Pump itself.

I appreciate all the responses, thanks again.

 

[Karadjgne]

In bios, if you have external software for the aio, the pump should always be at 100% constant. But most pumps are not variable speed either.

With that pump, the cpu_fan header in bios doesn't apply, it's not actually providing anything, just the single tach wire, no power. The tach is necessary to get around the cpu safety feature which if the header is unpopulated or reads 0 rpm, will turn off the pc and/or cause refusal to boot. The actual power is delivered by the Sata connection and the USB is responsible for the fan speeds through iCue.
Yes, those ML Pros are almost silent, but so should be the pump. There's usually only a 3-6°C difference between silent and performance modes and you'll only see that at torture testing, so for everyday gaming usage, silent is best.

Looking at the iCue screen, what's weird is the fan set on the motherboard, not Fan#2, at 4200rpm. That's not right by any means, and there's nothing actually capable of those speeds other than the pump itself. The only conclusion I can see is that you have something funky connected since even Fan#2 in both the H115i and mobo screens lists different speeds. So without knowing exactly how each fan is connected I'd have to say at least one of those readings is off, but maybe affecting outputs.