Finally, after months of wondering what was wrong with my Zalman Cooler, it got to be too much. I had just figured out in the last couple months that the Zalman was spinning at 100% all the time. This was very loud, probably louder than the stock heatsink.

For a few months now I’ve just lived with the problem every day, but it finally got to be too much for me. I downloaded a program called speedfan. I started playing with some settings and found that I didn’t have to lower the fan speed by much to make a huge difference.

At first I was worried that lowering the fan speed would cause the processor to overheat, but i left it down for a few minutes and just monitored the temps. I found that even with the HSF at 40% the temps didn’t rise at all. Even though the computer wasn’t doing anything the temps should still go up when the fan is down that low.

At this point I had to find out why the fan was spinning up so fast all the time if it didn’t need to. One quick google search later and I realized that I had not enabled automatic fan control in the BIOS. I rebooted right away to change that setting. What i found was that I could not only set the CPU fan to automatic, but the case fans as well.

Right now the CPU fan is at 2304 RPM with the rear case fan at 930 RPM and the front case fan at 870 RPM. This was a huge change in noise from the case. It’s much quieter than it was just 10 minutes ago. So don’t forget to enable that automatic fan control in the BIOS.