Zotac 9300 and SpeedFan not working.

T

thj

n00b
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Sep 19, 2006
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47
Hi,

I just got my ZOTAC GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi (PCB 04, the newest version), and my problem is that I can't get SpeedFan (and other hardware monitoring apps) working.

I updated the BIOS to the latest version (this one: http://www.zotac.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_details&gid=397&Itemid=100032&lang=nd).
And installed the latest Nvidia chipset drivers.

When running SpeedFan, the following is detected:

Win9x:NO 64Bit:YES GiveIO:NO SpeedFan:YES
I/O properly initialized
Linked ISA BUS at $0290
Linked nVidia MCP79 SMBUS at $1C00
Linked nVidia MCP79 SMBUS at $1C80
No active display found! (## running this one from a terminal)
Scanning ISA BUS at $0290...
Scanning nForce2 SMBus at $1C00...
Scanning nForce2 SMBus at $1C80...
Found WDC WD5000BEVT-22A0RT0 on AdvSMART
Found Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5400 @ 2.70GHz
End of detection
Loaded 0 events

I can see the temperature of HD0, Core 0, Core 1 and sometimes (!) it also finds the GPU. However, the temperatures of Core 0 and Core 1 is not reporting the same temperature as the BIOS (CPU temperature).

I would really like to get this working so I'm also able to adjust and monitor the fan speed.

Any ideas?
 
The bios is reporting the temp from a thermistor mounted somewhere on the board and has automatically labeled it as CPU temp (which it may or may not be depending on if the motherboard manuf followed normal convertions for connecting thermistors to the temp reporting chip)

Speedfan is reporting the internal core temp from Digital temp sensors embedded in the actual cpu die and will typically read much higher are more accurate and give a better picture of what is going on. These are the temp readings we use and trust. At around 100C core temp your cpu will send out an "I am hot" signal to the motherboard to spin the fans up to 100% speed and clock throttleing will start. Somewhere around 80C is a good personal limit on max operationg temps at full load.

I doubt speedfan is going to be able to do anything with your motherboards fans.
http://www.almico.com/forummotherboards.php
 
BillParrish said:
The bios is reporting the temp from a thermistor mounted somewhere on the board and has automatically labeled it as CPU temp (which it may or may not be depending on if the motherboard manuf followed normal convertions for connecting thermistors to the temp reporting chip)

Speedfan is reporting the internal core temp from Digital temp sensors embedded in the actual cpu die and will typically read much higher are more accurate and give a better picture of what is going on. These are the temp readings we use and trust. At around 100C core temp your cpu will send out an "I am hot" signal to the motherboard to spin the fans up to 100% speed and clock throttleing will start. Somewhere around 80C is a good personal limit on max operationg temps at full load.

I doubt speedfan is going to be able to do anything with your motherboards fans.
http://www.almico.com/forummotherboards.php
Click to expand...

Ah thank you for clarifying Bill.
I can see the fan speed and control it in the BIOS, so there must exist some application so that I can see it and control it from within Windows, no?
 
you should be able to preset the speeds in the bios.. or just let the bios take care of it.. this will only work if the heatsink has the 4 pin plug going to the motherboard..
 
I can see the fan speed and control it in the BIOS, so there must exist some application so that I can see it and control it from within Windows, no?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily, the bios is a very low level setup routine that almost directly interacts with the hardware to set up basic functionalilty. On one hand the bios is very simple in what it does but very complicated in how it does it as it must almost (and does occasionly) use native machine code (raw 1's and 0's is one way to think about it) to program the cpu, memory controller, video setup, input output, and tons of stuff just to make the collections of chips on a board behave as what we know as a 'PC'.

Windows is a much higher level language and while it uses bios routines the routines are for mainly input and output and those bios routines are designed to have an OS work with them. The hardware setup is not. In fact most of the bios functions are made so that an OS cannot talk to or modify them as since it is a "PC" certain things are expected to be set up certain ways and in general you do not want the OS to be able to modify them. Now fan speed would not be critical, but bios programming/code space is limited and not a lot of people are looking for this function. (enthusiasts are a minority). Server mchines and a few companies like Abit (now gone) did have bios code that the OS or in the bios provided much more fan control than typical. But most manuf do not go beyond the Intel or AMD provided bios routines to automatically control fan speed based on cpu temp with added user option to either disable fan speed control (run 100% speed all the time) or a voltage controlled fan speed based on the onboard thermister near the cpu. Finding boards with other options is rare for the reasons given. So it is not trivial to program windows compatible code to get into the fan control hardware and change stuff. Board Manuf do not do it as they see it as increased cost with little impact on sales/revenue. Programmers dont do it becasue almost every motherboard is different in the hardware used and its a pain in the ass. Thats why speedfan has not kept up, I am guessing here but I bet just about the time the developer figured out how to get it talking to the "latest greatest" board, the next generation of boards came out. Endless thankless task with not enough people willing to pay to make it worth the pain. This is why the developer let people do their own custom fan profiles.

All that said.

I found this.
http://www.zotacusa.com/forum/index.php?/topic/2276-sys-fan-control/

Poking around it seems a lot of people want what you do but no one yet has set down and figured out the speedfan add-in, yet.

This might be of interest, it would allow you to have case fans that mimic the cpu fan speed which should be tracking with the cpu temps, the nice thing is that it uses no memory or computer resources like speed fan would.

http://www.arctic-cooling.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=3_48_68&mID=113

they have 80mm fans that will share the cpu PWM fan header too.
 
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