Description
Case fans either drone constantly or take forever to spin up mid-game, because the BIOS gives you three or four coarse curve points. The vendor tools — MSI Afterburner, Armoury Crate, Gigabyte's suite — each only speak to their own hardware, and running three of them means they fight. FanControl puts every fan in one window: each fan gets a curve you draw yourself, fed by whichever temperature you pick — CPU, GPU, a drive, even coolant — regardless of who made the board.
The parameters that matter are the small ones. Step up and step down cap how fast the speed may change, so a momentary temperature spike does not make the fan lunge. Hysteresis — "only speed up after 3°C sustained for 3 seconds, only slow down after 10°C for 7 seconds" — is what actually kills the up-and-down surging. And a Mix curve combines two curves with Max, so a case fan follows whichever of CPU and GPU is hotter instead of ignoring a loaded graphics card. Free, funded by donations.
A custom curve per fan: drag points on a temperature-versus-speed graph, configured independently for every fan — far finer than the handful of BIOS presets.
Any sensor as the input: CPU package, individual cores, GPU die, VRAM, drives and board sensors can all drive a curve, so case fans tracking the graphics card is trivial.
Ramp rates and hysteresis: step up and step down bound the change per second while hysteresis sets how much and for how long a temperature must move before anything happens — together these are the fix for surging fans.
Mixed curves: combine several curves with Max or Average, for example taking the higher of the CPU and GPU curves so one fan covers two heat sources.
Start and stop thresholds: separate start % and stop % let a fan sit fully stopped at idle and spin up when needed, rather than humming at an unhelpful minimum.
Live tray icons: pin the temperatures or speeds you care about as tray icons, readable without opening the window.
Plugins for extra hardware: Corsair and NZXT coolers, Aquacomputer controllers and others are added by dropping a plugin into the Plugins folder and restarting.
Portable: a zip build runs unpacked with its configuration beside it, so moving to another machine is a copy.
The parameters that matter are the small ones. Step up and step down cap how fast the speed may change, so a momentary temperature spike does not make the fan lunge. Hysteresis — "only speed up after 3°C sustained for 3 seconds, only slow down after 10°C for 7 seconds" — is what actually kills the up-and-down surging. And a Mix curve combines two curves with Max, so a case fan follows whichever of CPU and GPU is hotter instead of ignoring a loaded graphics card. Free, funded by donations.
Features
A custom curve per fan: drag points on a temperature-versus-speed graph, configured independently for every fan — far finer than the handful of BIOS presets.
Any sensor as the input: CPU package, individual cores, GPU die, VRAM, drives and board sensors can all drive a curve, so case fans tracking the graphics card is trivial.
Ramp rates and hysteresis: step up and step down bound the change per second while hysteresis sets how much and for how long a temperature must move before anything happens — together these are the fix for surging fans.
Mixed curves: combine several curves with Max or Average, for example taking the higher of the CPU and GPU curves so one fan covers two heat sources.
Start and stop thresholds: separate start % and stop % let a fan sit fully stopped at idle and spin up when needed, rather than humming at an unhelpful minimum.
Live tray icons: pin the temperatures or speeds you care about as tray icons, readable without opening the window.
Plugins for extra hardware: Corsair and NZXT coolers, Aquacomputer controllers and others are added by dropping a plugin into the Plugins folder and restarting.
Portable: a zip build runs unpacked with its configuration beside it, so moving to another machine is a copy.
