

Even a mostly clueless user can plug fans in to the motherboard headers, run this utility, and enjoy 90% tuned, quiet fans. You run the qfan calibration in the bios, and the board detects the minimum speed that the fans will run at, setting a new minimum allowable fan speed. I was fully prepared to manually set fan curves (and you can, in the UEFI bios), but I hardly had to adjust a thing. My system appears dead silent, and it sits no more than 5' from my head, just off a hard wood floor. I did some Google searching, and was still not prepared for just how much better their DC / PWM fan management would be. That said, ASUS does not make it clear just how well their fan control works in their advertising or documentation. I actually bought the board in a large part due to the fan control. I personally went from a Gigabyte X58A-UD5 to an ASUS VII Hero, keeping the same case fans (and swapping the 140mm corsair fans on my H110 with noctua high static pressure fans) - the ASUS fan control in the UEFI system is spectacular in comparison to the Gigabyte offerings. This fact should be a salient point of motherboard reviews.Gigabyte's motherboard fan controls suck.This board is going back and I'm buying a used ASUS Maximus Gene off the FS/T board. So yay, my SP120 Quiet Edition fans can range all the way from just shy of 1100RPM to 1450RPM. To make things worse, the min fan speed apparently starts at over 70% of max speed. The only "manual" options are this convoluted percent of PWM signal per degree C thing, and you can't even specify a min and max fan speed or a desired min and max temp or really anything that a reasonable person would consider "manual". temperature settings, etc.īut no, not Gigabyte. temp graph setup, ASRock as their 5 fan speed vs. ASUS has min and max temp settings with associated fan speeds, MSI has their cool graphical speed vs.


Other Z-chipset "gaming-type" motherboards give you some nice granular control of fan speeds. This is one of those "little things" that should be mentioned in reviews. But none of the reviews of the board mentioned was how almost incomprehensibly shitty Gigabyte's motherboard fan controls are. I was looking forward to using a set of PWM fans for my Corsair H100 and letting the board control them to keep things quiet. So I recently bought a Z97MX-Gaming 5 for my new mATX gaming rig build. This is more of a rant than nsider yourself warned!
