H115i plantinium fan issue

Hi All,

Just recently installed my new h115i and all going well, but today I noticed when I wanted to change the fans from zero RPM to extreme that the fans wont go past 800rpm. Normally they would rise above 2000rpm . So I tried the balanced setting and drops a bit and zero RPM doesn't seem to work. All wires are all connected correctly and strange how it worked and now it doesn't. I updated software and noticed fans creeper up to 1000rpm but stopped after it finished ?

Fan speed/control is tied to coolant temperature and the presets do equate to Extreme=2000 rpm or something similar. All of them are relatively quiet at low coolant temperature. The extreme and balanced are just faster to ramp up the speed. So if you sit in zero fan mode for quite a while, the coolant temp is going to rise to a fairly high level and all fan presets will generate a strong response on re-initiating. If you engage it for a few minutes, that likely is not long enough to sufficiently raise the coolant temperature and it triggers a fan response commensurate with the lower temperature. I don't know what happens if you sit and there toggle it on/off. There are some underlying protections built in to keep you from putting yourself into harm. It is possible it won't let you re-engage it if the coolant is too high.

That said, my suggestion is you not use zero mode at all. Setting the fans to the absolute minimum (400-500 rpm) is going to provide a significantly stronger cooling effect than when your completely eliminate air flow across the radiator. You are soaking up all the heat, cutting off air intake if front mounted, and eliminating VRM/RAM cooling if top mounted. You build the coolant and case temp level up to a high mark, then need to blast the fans for 5-10 minutes to bring it back to the start. Or you can leave the fan at the slowest speed and never get anywhere close to the "loud response" zone. Whether your goal is quiet or temperature management, low speed fans are always better than zero speed. It is possible to set-up a passive cooling system, but not as simple as toggling the fans off.

Thanks for your response. I was only concerned as when i installed last week, I noticed the presents would ramp up the fans regardless of coolant temps. Example set extreme and fans would slowly rise up to 2000rpm regardless of temps.

I have this mounted at the front of case and still won't the fans to push more air through.

So, if I am corrected, on extreme mode set the fans will only rise up if the coolant temperatures start to rise. Before I would set and they would boost up automatically regardless of temps?

If you go to the Performance tab under the cooler and click +, it will create a custom curve. Look at the three shape tools in the upper right corner of the graph. We believe those correspond to the three presets. Regardless, Quiet, Balanced, and Extreme are just cooling curves with data points (temp x = fan speed y) like any other. When you jump off zero mode, the strength of the fan response will be related to the coolant temp and the fan speed prescribed by the active curve.

The issue with using zero mode is while your end cpu temps are not likely to be high when reading or doing light desktop work, the coolant temp is still building all the while. When you do re-engage the fans, the coolant may be near the same level as if you had been pushing hard for the last 30-60 minutes. The fans react accordingly to try and bring it down. So 30 minutes no fans in exchange for 10 minutes of blasting. Probably not a good trade. Makes more sense (from a noise perspective) if you shutdown/sleep and leave, letting cool off naturally over time. Now all that said, zero mode has some quirks and I don’t know how many are using it. I don’t have a lot of data as to its internal behavior.