Found a way to control the W2V fan!

I finally figured out a way to control the W2V fan. Please note that I do not know what I'm doing and why exactly it works, so in other words try it at your own risk

I managed to do it with SpeedFan 4.25 which you can download at http://www.almico.com. It will detect (at least for me) an IT8712F chip and an ADT7463. The second one is the important one.

If you go to the advanced configuration and select the ADT7463 chip you see that it has a reserved value for PWM 1 mode. That (I think) means that it does some predermined stuff by asus to control the fan. How did I find out this was the one? Well by disabling it of course .

So, how to use this to our advantage? Well if you put the fan on manual control we can influence the speed ourselves with this very nifty utility. You can control it with Speed04 by default (Pwm1@ADT7463). I found out that by setting the speed to 100% I turned it off and by setting it to 0% I turn it fully on. So, we gotta change an option in the advanced settings to reverse the logic. Just go to "Configure" -> "Advanced" -> "ADT7463" -> "Reverse PMW01 logic" -> "ON".

Right now you can let speedfan automatically determine the ideal fan speed for you. All you need to do is to set desired temperatures and 'warning' temperatures (at which the fan goes to full speed). The only problem that remains is that I have 5 temperature readings and I don't know which one is which I know of two for sure (can be verified with CHC and Asus Probe):
- The CPU is CPU@ADT7463
- The HD is HD0@HD0

That leaves me with three seemingly valid temperatures:
- Local@ADT7463: 45C (Mobo?)
- Remote2@ADT7463: 52C (GPU?)
- Temp1@ACPI: 54C (I think this one is invalid as it hasn't changed at all in 30 minutes already)

I'll try to figure out which is which now (leaving the fan control back in the hands of Asus to be sure ).

Just some more things I noticed:
- There seems to be only one fan (or atleast one fan which can be controlled and measured). If I turn it off, the entire notebook falls silent, so either all other fans are linked to this fan or there is only one.
- By default it runs at about 55% on idle and I think 70-80% on full load (when gaming for instance).
- It's absolutely frightening to hear this beast roar at 100%

Oh, you can read the Fan speed at Fan1@ADT7463. The RPM reported seems valid (you can verify it with Asus Probe).

 

Wow LuCkY, that's really awesome news. I think you've sealed the deal for me. If anyone in the US was going to freak out over fan noise, it would definitely be me. About a year ago I bought and returned Sager np8790 over fan noise, and back then I too tried different things - flashed latest bios, used a utility to substantially underclock the cpu (that was a pentium 4 machine - although I chose it mainly for style, not Pentium 4 power), tried several fan-controlling utilities, but they didn't work with that laptop. Almost a year down the road I am still in the market for that "perfect" notebook - and now that you've harnessed the mighty propellers - I think W2 might be really it...
:asus:

 

Good find! I'm gonna try it this afternoon if I have time.....
Maybe a note of warning should be posted here. I do not think Asus will honour a warranty claim with a messed up notebook if you cook your hardware this way........

 

Although you found the new version of speedfan to work, I suggest against it unless you really know what you're doing and have a really accurate program to measure the cpu and gpu temps. The lower you set the fans, the higher your temps will get. That could lead to the system being more uncomfortable and reduced performance..... maybe in extreme cases, hardware failure, but I seriously doubt that as the system will shut itself down before you even get close to doing damage.

Noise from fans are something you'll have to live with to a point. As systems get more powerful, they create more heat. As systems get smaller, the cooling elements get smaller, along with the fans. Therefore the fans word at higher rpms, more often.... and often with increased fin angles......... all of this creates more "noise" as the air is expelled harder and faster. If these systems were 3x the size, one giant fan spinning slowly could move the same amount of air but you'd never hear it.

... It's all a give and take. Be careful with speedfan and only use it when you're being light on the system......... When you're going all out, make sure those fans are moving at the rpm's they're supposed to!

 

I tried manipulating the fan speed with Speedfan but it doesn't work.

It only recognises the IT8712F chip but if I try to alter the settings as described in the first post nothing happens.

I do not see a ADT7463 chip in the configuration of Speedfan....

 

Yes, speedfan seems to have some difficulties detecting the chip. Its rather random when it detects it for me. I have asked the author of the program about it, but I didn't get any response yet.

As for some further progress on this: for me it seemed cool enough to put the fan at 15% (a bit under 1000RPM). This got the temperature at a steady 43C for the CPU, 33C for the HD and 54C for the GPU. The fan makes an annoying sound at this speed though (I guess due to it rotating very slowly) so I put it at 20-25%, which is a lot more pleasant. Then I just set the target temperature about 5C higher than the idle temperatures (so the fan kicks in when the temperature rises) and I put the max fan speed at 80%. The warning temperature is set at around 65C (fan kicks in at 100% then). This way I have it running very cool and very silent.

 

Thank you Lucky for your report. Unfortunately I have not been able to duplicate your success with Speedfan either. It doesn't detect the ADT7463 on my system, even after 20+ retrys.

Can you think of any reason it works on your system, but not on others (at least not the ones reported in this thread). Did you configure it in some way? Or are you running a different BIOS version?

 

For some reason Speedfan doesn't always detect the chip. It has detected it for me twice now, but no more (out of 10-20 runs). I have already contacted the author about this, but he has not yet been able to help me with it. He asked me to do a Send Report with the chip detected and once without it, but that's rather hard to do if I can't get it detected again...

As for a small hint about when it did work for me: on both occassions it was on the first run after installing a new version...

 

You could always reinstall your whole system... and then install speedfan again :=)
I have tried with no success.

Another solution could be asking Asus a screen in the BIOS to control this, I've already done (writing them an e-mail an posting that in their support forums...)

 

Well, this whole weekend I spent trying to control the godd*mn fan. No luck. Lucky's method didn't work for me. In fact, I never even saw this ADT7463 chip mentioned in any diagnostics software, such as ms info and asus probe.

Lucky - can you tell us on what bus and what address the SpeedFan is locating the ADT7463 chip for you? For IT8712 for instance it says,

Scanning ISA BUS at $0290...
IT8712F/IT8705F found on ISA at $290

While I couldn't explicitly control the fan, I tried to underclock and undervold the CPU and the GPU, hoping that the fan would slow down on its own once there is not much heat being generated. I ran CPU at 800Mhz and 0.76V, and ATI card at about 118Mhz. The CPU temp went down and stayed at around 43C, but the fan kept on spinning the same exact way!

I will be following up with the author of speed fan to see what he can advise.. In the meanwhile, any references to any other fan-controlling utils are desperately appreciated.. Centrino hardware control has the fan option disabled for this model notebook. And the fan is way too loud for me. I mean, here I am, just typing in a web browser - the CPU is practically idle - and the fan is on really strong. In a quiet room with closed windows this is really annoying..

 

I don't know the address of the chip unfortunatelly. I do know it's at the SMBus however.