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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Using the T_SENSOR on Asus Maximus VII Gene board

T_SENSOR

One of the new features introduced by Asus with the new round of motherboards for the mainstream Intel CPUs was the ability to incorporate thermal readings of a user installable thermal probe for its monitoring and fan controlling software. Not all motherboard supports it and not all of them came with the thermal probe even if supported. Only the highest end boards came with the probes. Despite my Maximus VII Gene board being the highest end Micro ATX board made for this platform by Asus (or any other vendor for that matter), it didn’t came with the probe. Sadness, but at least it indeed supported this feature.

When I was moving the system from the ATX case to the Micro ATX case the other day (read all about it here), I came across an extra thermal probe that came bundled with the old Scythe fan controller that I had been using a while back. I had already sold the fan controller via Rakuten Auctions (because I moved from it to the Fan Xpert software on Asus boards) without bundling it up. Well, there is nothing I could do about it now, but I wanted to see if that particular probe was compatible with the motherboard.

And, it was!

Now, temperature of which component should it sense? I thought about the temps cooling plan of the case, and there was only one obvious candidate. The video card. The side intake towards the front of the case was simply pumping fresh air in for the video card. It doesn’t have to run at all, if the video card is idle. So I figured that I could control the fan speed of that fan according to the video card’s temperature. The top intake and the rear exhaust were directly associated with the CPU anyways.

video card

You cannot see where I have stick it inside the graphics card, but it is sneaked in between two fins of the heatsink and it fitted tightly. I wish the color of the cable was black, but I don’t have to worry about the aesthetics now that the current case doesn’t have a window on the side panel to show off the internals.

These are the settings that I am using to control the fan speed from BIOS. There is about 3-4C delta between the GPU temperature reported by the driver and the one reported by the sensor though. I am also completely turning off the fan when the temp is below 40C, which corresponds to the GPU being idle.

fan controlling

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