The replacement HE01 cooler works fine...phew!

When I got the replacement cooler from Amazon, the first thing I did was to plug the fan directly into the power supply. When you do that, the expected result is for the fan to spin up at full speed - that is at 2000RPM. I made sure that the RPM limiter switch was switched to the performance mode as well. To my relief, the fan seemed to run at full speed though there was no way to confirm that the fan was hitting 2000RPM. But it definitely felt like 2000RPM, for the sound and the air flow generated from it.

But I wouldn't be running the fan directly off the PSU. I would be running it off the motherboard CPU fan headers. It wouldn’t mean squat if it cannot work with the motherboard. So to find out if if the motherboard truly wasn’t the culprit the last time, I plugged in the fan to the motherboard and luckily for me, it also ran at full speed. w00t!

There was no way in hell that I would be running the fan at 2000RPM. While it is not as deafening as the two TY-143’s I had on the Silver Arrow Extreme cooler, I still had to tame down the fan speed.

The Silverstone FHP-141 on my HE01 got stuck at 500RPM

It is the weirdest thing that I have ever encountered.

Couple of days before I ordered the Maximus VII Gene motherboard, I ordered the Silverstone Heligon HE01 CPU cooler. The cooler worked pretty well on my old Maximus VI Hero motherboard. I had the fan on the CPU fan header and just used the automatic fan control settings in the UEFI.

But when I installed the cooler on the new motherboard, the fan stopped working properly. When I say "stopped working properly", I mean that the fan did not want to rev past 500RPM. The fan is supposed to rev up to 2000RPM at its maximum PWM signal strength. What's so special about 500RPM figure is that it is the lowest RPM that the fan can operate using the PWM signal.

I blamed the motherboard at first. That was the obvious thing to do given the circumstances. I thought the PWM signal from the motherboard was not compatible with the fan. Asus does a lot of non-standard things with their motherboards (that's to give more value additions of course), the Fan Xpert feature in this case.

Maximus VII Gene installation experience

In the previous post I mentioned that I got my new board and also about some issues I had while installing it. But I didn’t post any pics, so here are some photos of the entire thing.

Food! The little guy joined the party.

In the box.