Question No Fan Speed Control—ASUS M11BB:

[Edward Jones]

Hello. I Upgraded the cooling in my M11BB, adding a case fan and better CPU fan. Fans are 4 pin PWM. The issue is that I can only set the fans to two speeds: If Q-fan is enabled in the BIOS then they run at one speed, a slower one, if it is disabled then they run at their maximum speed.

My research keeps telling me to access settings and menus that aren’t there. AI Suite II—there is no “fan Xpert” tab or setting I can find. In the BIOS—there is no Q-Fan tuning or power option. (Note: My BIOS is one generation behind—307 not the most recent 403 —which I would rather not fiddle with; Asus says it’s “up to date” I might consider upgrading if I knew it’d resolve this issue.) I know both of these things are available to some—they keep coming up on google with screen shots and so forth—but they don’t appear on my system, unless I’m really, really missing something. As far as the ASUS driver site says, even AI Suite II isn’t for my system—but it seems to work okay for what it does—including giving temp warnings and fan speeds —but no control. AI Suite iii says ‘not for my model’ when I try to load it–so that “Fan Xpert” isn’t available unless its hiding from me in Suite ii — but, even though suite II got loaded somehow, Fan Xpert is missing, or is not part of it.

I have exhausted all the highest recommend 3rd party options—none so far have provided any control to the fans — certainly not the ability to program them to respond to the CPU temp. (SpeedFan, for example—displays wildly inaccurate fan speeds, although its temperatures are accurate—and there is no option to control the fans. And some other programs all failed for one reason or another.)

Also—loaded “Asus manager” for my system—everything is grayed out (including power)—except for “Update” and “Support”.

So—any idea why my system wouldn’t have access to either “Fan Expert” in Suite II or “Q-Fan Tuning” and “power” options in the BIOS? Thank You

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

What motherboard do you have?

 

[Edward Jones]

Thanks for your reply. Much to my surprise, Asus help actually responded, even though my machine is years old. Basically they said it's a cheapo MB that doesn't have the feature of programmable fan control. Something like: this system was designed for basic users--we don't expect people who buy this PC to be fiddling with stuff like fan control.

I did notice, when I had the case off there was a sticker on the MB with a long string of numbers along with the M11BB--I did not write it down--but that is consistent with the idea that there are different models of that MB and, according to ASUS, the model that came with my PC lacks this feature.

Just for the fun of it I bought a couple HW-585 boards and am running the fans off of them with the temperature probes stuck in the heat sync fins. That's working for now.