Concept

Computer fan control

Fan control is the management of the rotational speed of an electric fan. In computers, various types of computer fans are used to provide adequate cooling, and different fan control mechanisms balance their cooling capacities and noise they generate. This is commonly accomplished by the motherboards having hardware monitoring circuitry, which can be configured by the end-user through BIOS or other software to perform fan control. As modern PCs grow more powerful so do their requirements for electrical power. Computers emit this electrical power as heat generated by all major components. Heat production varies with system load, where periods of compute-intensive activity generate much more heat than the idle time does. Processors in most early x86-based computers, up to some of the early 486s, did not need active ventilation. Power supplies needed forced cooling, and power supply fans also circulated cooling air through the rest of the PC with the ATX standard. The byproduct of increased heat generation is that the fan(s) need to move increasing amounts of air and thus need to be more powerful. Since they must move more air through the same area of space, fans will become more noisy. Fans installed in a PC case can produce noise levels of up to 70 dB. Since fan noise increases with the fifth power of the fan rotation speed, reducing revolutions per minute (RPM) by a small amount potentially means a large reduction in fan noise. This must be done cautiously, as excessive reduction in speed may cause components to overheat and be damaged. If done properly fan noise can be drastically reduced. The common cooling fans used in computers use standardized connectors with two to four pins. The first two pins are always used to deliver power to the fan motor, while the rest can be optional, depending on fan design and type: Ground - common ground Vcc (Power) - nominally a +12 V supply, though it may be variable depending on fan type and desired fan rotation speed Sense (or tachometer) output from fan - outputs a signal that pulses twice for each revolution of the fan as a pulse train, with the signal frequency proportional to the fan speed Control input - a pulse-width modulation (PWM) input signal, used when the cooling fan assembly has an internal motor driver circuit.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related lectures (1)
Related publications (11)

Radiation-tolerant Multichannel Dew Point Temperature Monitoring System for High Energy Physics Applications

Amar Kapic

The next generation of high-energy physics (HEP) detectors will predominantly be silicon-based. As pixel sensor technology gains momentum and the number of channels surpasses one billion (for a volume of approximately 20 m3) to achieve the high resolution ...
EPFL2023

Dynamic Thermal Management with Proactive Fan Speed Control Through Reinforcement Learning

David Atienza Alonso, Marina Zapater Sancho, Arman Iranfar, Federico Terraneo, Gabor Andras Csordas

Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) has become a major challenge since it directly affects Multiprocessors Systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) performance, power consumption, and reliability. In this work, we propose a transient fan model, enabling adaptive fan speed co ...
IEEE2020

Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of a 34 Watt Radial-Inflow Steam Turbine with Partial-Admission

Jan Van Herle, Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Patrick Hubert Wagner

A micro steam turbine with a tip diameter of 15 mm was designed and experimentally characterized. At the nominal mass flow rate and total-to-total pressure ratio of 2.3 kg/h and 2, respectively, the turbine yields a power of 34 W and a total-to-static isen ...
2020
Show more
Related concepts (2)
Drive bay
A drive bay is a standard-sized area for adding hardware to a computer. Most drive bays are fixed to the inside of a case, but some can be removed. Over the years since the introduction of the IBM PC, it and its compatibles have had many form factors of drive bays. Four form factors are in common use today, the 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch drive bays. These names do not refer to the width of the bay itself, but rather to the width of the disks used by the drives mounted in these bays. 8.
Computer cooling
Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer components, to keep components within permissible operating temperature limits. Components that are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated include integrated circuits such as central processing units (CPUs), chipsets, graphics cards, and hard disk drives. Components are often designed to generate as little heat as possible, and computers and operating systems may be designed to reduce power consumption and consequent heating according to workload, but more heat may still be produced than can be removed without attention to cooling.

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.