h115i noob needing some advice....

Dear All,

I have just installed a new H115i Pro cooler on my AMD fx8350 box. It is running Clear Linux (uefi enabled). I don't have Windows on it.

The motherboard is the ASUS sabertooth 990FX r2.0 (I hope it is OK to mention ASUS name on the on the site here -please correct me if I am not meant to do this according to the forum rules and I will remove it).

The light comes on when I boot up the machine and I think the pump is running OK etc.

But the fans don't seem to start to turn round.

The BIOS is giving me a "cpu fan error" message or something like that at the terminal after boot up.

There are a couple of four pin fan controller sockets at the top of the motherboard above the cpu that I can plug the fan cables into that emanate from the pump housing.

On the left hand side is a 3 pin socket that I plugged the cpu fan plug into that is very close to the cpu/pump union site.

I connected the lead from the pump housing to a free usb header at the base of the motherboard.

Since I am not running Windows 10 on the machine I likely won't be able to run the cooling software that Corsair has helpfully created for the pump system.

But I think the pump should still work under linux if I understand it correctly.

I have a couple of questions.

If I can't get the fans to fire up and turn round behind the radiator, will the pump still be able to deliver some cooling to the CPU?

If the answer is yes, and I only run the PC with a light load on it (no compiling gcc etc!!!!!!) will the cpu be safe ie not overheat while I try to figure out what might fix the fan problem etc with your help?

Is it the case that the fans might not turn on immediately because the cpu is not hot enough yet to require it and if I ran the machine for a while they might then start to turn round?

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Regards

Michael Fothergill

You will get a CPU boot error if there no working device (pump or fan) on the specific CPU_FAN header. Something must be there to boot and it is designed to prevent you from running without cooling. There is a method of turning off the warning in the BIOS, but that also does remove the protection aspect. Fastest immediate solution is to put the pump 3 pin on CPU_FAN.

Even without the configuration software, the fans and pump will still follow a pre-programmed curve. This should effective for most people, but perhaps not for anyone in a very warm room or with extreme prolonged loads. In that situation, you may want manual controls and can get by moving the fans back to motherboard headers.

A great many thanks for the prompt response........

I thought I had attached the 3 pin plug (the one coming from the pump housing which is a very thin wiry looking cable) to what I thought was the 3 pin cpu fan socket on the motherboard.

I will check again carefully and make sure.

I cheated as you worried about and set the *ignore* setting in the BIOS and fired up clear linux OS....

The OS booted up OK and I then ran *watch sensors*. I could feel some warmth emanating from the radiator.

The temperature seems to have kept on the low side (32C).

But of course the cpu fan setting according to watch sensors remained at 0 rpm the whole time.

Which it would do since I turned off the monitoring of it in the BIOS....

The chassis fans are turning round.

Regards

MF

OK. I went and checked with the ASUS motherboard handbook.

I had plugged the 3 pin adapter into the wrong socket....

I found what is a 4 pin cpu fan header at the top of the motherboard and then attached the Corsair 3 pin adapter (looks like that to me) into it and then logged into the BIOS and turned on the cpu monitoring again.

It immediately read out a positive number of around 2000 rpm.

I then logged in again and the linux OS fired up and I checked the watch sensors output.

Unlike on the bios output it still says the fan speed is zero.

But the temperature of the CPU is low at 13.4C.

ie k10temp-pci-0003 registers as 13.4C

The idle power consumption fam15 power_pci_0004 = 20W

The asus-isa-0000 output for cpu fan reads 0 rpm.

watch sensors gives all this output.....

I now need to find two 4 pin fan header sockets to attach the two fan plugs that sit back to back attached to a fairly broad cable somewhere on the motherboard.....

If I had Windows 10 running then the software that runs the cooler would be able to use those cables to control the fan speeds I think.

The fans on the radiator are still not turning round yet.

Cheers ignoramously,

MF

Dear All,

I am going to go on the ASUS site and ask them a few questions about where next to plug in the two back to back fan plugs on the motherboard plus a few other questions about the four pin cpu header interaction with the 115i pro cpu adapter plug......

Then I will try installing the opencorsairlink software.

Cheers

MF

You won't see fan speeds with the H115i controller power the fans. Just the pump speed. If you need to see the fan speed and have control in Linux, you will need to move the fans to CHA motherboard headers and set a BIOS fan curve.

Nobody's CPU is ever 13C unless it is powered off in a very cold room. I suspect that is a little AMD sensor issue, but I don't really remember all the specifics from that model.

Many thanks again for your advice.

On the motherboard there are three CHA fan headers. They are situated some distance from each other around the periphery of the motherboard.

I had some case fans plugs into them.

I have unplugged the case fan adapters.

If I wanted to plug BOTH fan adapter plugs into two of the CHA fan header sockets on the motherboard I don't think that is going to work very well.

That is because the cable with the two fan adapter plugs supplied with the Corsair 116i unit is a singular wide (1 cm) thick cable which only splits into the two separate CHA fan plug adapters right at the end of the supplied cable.

I don't think you can pull the cable apart down the middle to allow the two CHA fan adapters to become independently positioned so they could be hooked up to CHA fan headers that are e.g. 15 to 20 or more cm away from one another on the motherboard.

Or so it would seem to me unless I have been supplied with a cable which has been incorrectly manufactured such that it is fused together throughout most of its length in a way that Corsair did not actually intend in practice.

I don't think that is the case.

I think (please correct me if i am wrong here) that Corsair assumed that there would be e.g. two CHA fan header sockets sitting adjacent to each other on the motherboard that would allow me to plug both CHA fan adapters into the two sockets back to back on the motherboard as it were.

But that is not really possible on this motherboard it would seem.

If I can only connect one fan controller plug adapter of the two to the motherboard will that suffice here?

Also, when the bios now says it sees the cpu fan and quotes an rpm number for it, am I to interpret that as some index of the pump speed?

After all there is no physical cpu fan here any more.

All there is now is the pump.

And two pesky fans sitting behind a radiator that never seem to bother turning round at all.

But maybe they will after I do this fan curve setting thing however it is meant to be performed.

Also will the other case fans be problematic if I connect any of them up alongside one of the pump radiator fans?

Sorry to drone one like this but I think I am beginning to understand this a bit better now.

Cheers

MF

Case fan adapters? I didn’t think the 730T had a case fan controller, unlike the 760T sibling. You can plug standard case fan power connectors 3/4 pin into wherever you can.

The H115i comes with a splitter meant to power the two radiator fans from the pump. If it is not long enough to go where you need, you’ll need to acquire a 3rd party fan splitter. Make sure it is a “PWM splitter”. That is 1x4 pin and 1x3 pin. The speed pin is removed on wire two since both fans run the same speed. If you have the stock SP140L grey fans that came with the cooler, no more fans should be connected along with them. They have a fairly high current draw. Given your limitations in board headers, you wish to leave them on the H115i for power/control.

CPU Fan will read the pump in the BIOS when the pump lead is connected. That is not a power line — just speed/device detection. This is not required for the cooler the function. As mentioned the BIOS will flag you if you don’t. Most Asus boards allow you to disable this in the by scrolling over to the cpu fan reading in the Monitor section, clicking it, and selecting “ignore”. Cpu fan could then be used as a case fan or CPU/OPT as the radiator fan headers. However, be aware these will be bound to cpu temperature as the control variable. Not quite as annoying on older CPUs vs recent hyper-reactive designs.

The radiator fans should always spin and never be off, although you can make them go as slow as you like. If they are not spinning now, where are they connected?

Dear All,

I looked at some more videos on the 115i install and realised I did something dumb here.

I forgot to pull the cables out from under the fans and then attach each to the double headed connector cable that emanates from the pump head.

Oops.

Now the fans on the radiator turn round.

I am going to put the system through its paces with a compilation of gcc in gentoo and see how well it performs.

If it starts to overheat I will kill the job off.

Next stop opencorsairlink.

Many thanks.

Regards

MF