cpu, fan speed, cool and quiet etc

[badbetty]

Hello folks

Asus M4A78 Pro Phenom II x8 quad is the guts of my desktop running Ubuntu 9.04.

Please, is there anyone who has a good degree of knowledge to resolve getting the 'cool and quiet' feature [of the hardware] working so it does all that it should properly?

I believe, the cores' MHz are being affected, but not the fan(s).

I have got the BIOS settings enabled. I have 'cpufreqd' and the utils all loaded, including and applet and it seems that Ubuntu is reducing the MHz on my core(s) it seems; all of them i hope!

However, the fan speed remains at full speed all the time, despite the MHz reductions on the cores.
(are all fans controlled I wonder).

I have tried lm_sensors, but it cannot detect any K10 based sensors it seems - 'driver to be written' is the msg - when in detect mode.

I have to say that in Win XP [spit] , the software really does shut all the machine down to really quiet when idle - even the fans!

How does one control all this reliably and correctly?
As you can guess I am really very new to all this Linux stuff.

Thank you for any help; and for reading!
BB

[mad0master]

yeah, my laptop also got a sort of noisy...

[compeng]

I have a ASUS M4A78E-T mobo with an AMD Phenom II 945 quad core. I am interested in what the cool-n-quiet features does too. I just turned it on.

I started to play with the Q-fan 2 features. It seems to reduce the fan speeds if you set it to [Quiet]. I am not sure I trust it to turn the fans up when it needs it. I tried to install lm-sensors. It did not detect anything it could control. Badbetty did you try this yet?

[Petter s]

I also have ASUS M4A78E-T and the cpu-fan is running at max all the time in ubuntu 10.04. It is really quiet in windows.
compeng where did you set it to [Quiet]?

[tehowe]

Installing powernowd from Synaptic will adjust the frequency of your cores, but even with Cool and Quiet enabled on my ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO USB3 and powernowd doing its thing, I still haven't heard the fan take a break yet.

You can watch what your cores are doing with

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i Mhz

They'll stay at topspeed unless you have powernowd installed. If you want to give them a workout, open terminal windows and run

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/null

Now if you drop into a shell and

man fancontrol

Clearly this is some kind of util for fine-grained control of fan speeds. Searching around elsewhere on this forum, I discovered there's a script that's supposed to help you set up the fancontrol config file called 'pwmconfig' but running it from root told me that

/usr/sbin/pwmconfig: There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed

Any hardware gurus willing to point this thread in the right direction to shut noisy fans up? Sample config file for fancontrol maybe? I've an AMD Phenom II x6 BTW

[tehowe]

Installing powernowd from Synaptic will adjust the frequency of your cores, but even with Cool and Quiet enabled on my ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO USB3 and powernowd doing its thing, I still haven't heard the fan take a break yet.

And blah blah blah...

Forget about that. As it turns out, I was missing as additional BIOS setting as well. For some reason the Asus M4A88TD-V EVO USB3, and probably others, come with a default Q-Fan setting of NORMAL (it's in the POWER subsection of the BIOS). 'Normal', apparently, is to have your computer sound like a jet turbine, with my 1090T hexcore running at around 5500 - 6000 RPM.

I simply changed this setting to SILENT and now we're at far more reasonable sounding ~4000 RPM. Try it out, your fan bearings will thank you.