I've been trying to make my computer more quiet at night. The obvious thing is to put it in suspend. Unfortunately it doesn't wake consistently. In fact if I suspend for 8 hours I'm very lucky if it wakes.
But I had already spliced in a switch for one of my power supplies. I have a dedicated power supply for my graphics card. It really doesn't need a fan and runs all the time so I made a quick disconnect wire for it.
So late last night I decided I would do the same thing to my CPU fan. Well it was around midnight and I wasn't thinking straight or taking the time to do things correctly so I thought I could get away with doing one test without the heat shrink on the wire just to see it working. Well the fan cover must has pushed some exposed wire into the heatsink which is probably grounded and shorted the power line.
So now it seems that the mobo can't recognize even a virgin fan. I'm looking at the heat sink on this computer and I'm realizing it is massive. There is no way this computer is going to heat that thing quickly. So I decide to just run it fanless and monitor the temperatures.
Looks like my computer didn't need a fan for average usage to begin with. So now things are really quiet.
But this gives me an excuse to do what I really wanted, which is integrate a micro controller to control everything with a lot more control than my OS seems to be letting me. I will still need a fan for gaming or data crunching. So for now my desktop is for light use until I have some cooling solution in. But the advantage is now I'll be able to control the activation temperature so that it will be fanless 90% of the time. This will include night even without suspending.
So in the end I get everything I wanted. I just needed this mobo to short to thrust me to the real solution.
For now I just have a steal cup of water sitting on top of it as insurance. It doesn't need it but if things do get toasty (if I launch some process I didn't think would be heavy) it should take care of me.
It looks like the steel cup lowers the temp from 33C to 29C. So that's 4 degrees even when things are close to room temperature. It should activate a lot more in the 70C range and become a more active form of cooling if things go above baseline temperatures.