What is this section?
This section includes articles related to SpeedFan. They will cover both technical and non technical
aspects. Some articles will originate from frequently asked questions I will try to illustrate more
in depth. Some others will be related to SpeedFan and its fields of application, from hardware
monitoring to CPU overheating, from the importance of a good ventilation inside the computer case to
the effects of noise on human productivity.
If you are interested in some argument and would like to suggest an argument for an article, feel
free to contact me at articles [at] almico.com. You can even write to me if you have an article to
post here. Your name will be given credits. You can mail me the text without any special formatting.
You can include images, but they should not be too big.
The RSS feed that you can find at the bottom of every page on this web site can be used to keep you
informed about the latest updates to this section too.
Available articles
SpeedFan 4.51 added support for 5 PWM controls on the ITE IT8620E. This chip is a custom one made by ITE for Gigabyte and no datasheet was available. After several tests on multiple motherboards, SpeedFan became able to control the speed of up to 5 fans using PWM. Unfortunately, Gigabyte seems to have implemented fan control in different ways across his range of motherboards and it has been reported that changing PWM4 using SpeedFan leads to a PC power off on some of them. On many others, the majority at the moment of writing, PWM4 works great to change the speed of one of the fans.
Alfredo Milani Comparetti (12 Feb 2015)
SpeedFan 4.44 introduced a new Advanced Fan Speed control strategy that greatly improves the previous version. The previous version is still available, though. Now fan speeds can be controlled by means of custom response curves. Different temperatures can have different response curves and multiple temperatures can control each fan speed.
Alfredo Milani Comparetti (03 Jul 2011)
An event (or alarm) is an action triggered by some kind of condition. You can configure one event to beep if CPU temperature gets too high, or you can create one to show a popup message when the speed of chipset fan is too low. You can cause the system to beep every 7 seconds when the battery voltage appears to be too low and so on. Advanced options and much more are discussed in this article.
Alfredo Milani Comparetti (02 Aug 2006)
Almost every modern hard disk includes S.M.A.R.T. support. Besides being a way to know the temperature of our hard disk, it is a way to know whether our hard disk is still reliable or not. By monitoring S.M.A.R.T. data we can prevent data disasters and replace it when it is still possible and easy. S.M.A.R.T. data can be useful to optimize our hard disk too. For example: we might discover that the cabling is poor and that it needs to be fixed.
Alfredo Milani Comparetti (08 Feb 2006)
SpeedFan uses several command line switches to enable or disable specific features that can't be automatically discovered and/or used by SpeedFan. Some parameters are helpful to fix issues with some drivers that cause the whole system to crash (like some HD drivers that do not handle properly standard S.M.A.R.T. calls) or with custom hardware from some manufacturer. If your system is having troubles running SpeedFan, then some combination of these switches will most likely fix it.
Alfredo Milani Comparetti (19 Mar 2005)
Describes the technical details behind Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) and explains how it can be used to control fan speeds in modern computers and how PWM can interfere with reported RPMs causing odd values to appear when fans are slowed down.
Alfredo Milani Comparetti (13 Dec 2004)