I do receive a lot of reports using the built-in facility.
What do I expect from your
reports?
I'm always eager to get reports from unsupported hardware. The best reports for me are those where almost nothing has been found. I always work on them ASAP. Obviously, in order to be able to fix SpeedFan to try to make it work with that hardware, I need your support. I do have some computers, but not every kind of hardware :-) If you plan to receive help from me, you should specify a valid email address. Please note that, in order to add support for new hardware, I need to send to you a new beta (a beta version is a private version of the software before the actual, final, new release is ready). In order to do so I need from you a valid email address that is able to receive an attachment (less than 1MB).
What might you expect from reporting?
Most of all you should ask for support for your
unrecognized hardware monitoring chips. If this is the case, please give me as
many info as you can. For example: you might tell me if any other hardware
monitoring software is able to detect it, which name it has, where it is located
(ISA, SMBus,...), the name that might be written on your system manual, or, if
you can, the names written on the chips on your motherboard. Usually, hardware
monitoring chips have got more than 10 pins and do not have heatsinks (actually,
I've never seen one with an heatsink :-)).
If you would like me to add support for your CLOCK (PLL) chip, you should
carefully look at your motherboard and tell me the whole name. The clock chip is
easy enough to find, as it is located near to a 14.xx MHz quartz (a small silver
coated object protruding from the MB).
How to report
Before reporting, you might try to understand
whether your motherboard supports fan speed changing or not. If you dare
changing fan speeds, you might consider reading my
point of view on this topic :-)
Please, note that fan speed changing does not require a 3-wire fan. Any fan
should work, if the motherboard supports fan speed changing.
You should connect a fan to every fan header
on your motherboard. If you do not have that many fans, keep in mind that not
every fan header might be able to change fan speeds. On my ABIT BP6, for
example, only 2 out of 3 fan headers support it. You should try to change fan
header and try again.
The first step to check whether your motherboard is able to change fan speeds is
trying to actually STOP fans. Set each speed down to 0%. Do not rely on reported
fan speeds: reported fan speeds are usually wrong when coming to PWM modulation.
Simply "listen" to your fans, or, better, look at them :-) If you are
able to stop any fan, then it's likely to be possible to change fan speeds! Fan
speed changing depends on some additional circuitry on the motherboard. Not
every hardware manufacturer adds it. Depending on the actual circuitry, fan
speed changing might be possible and might be more or less linear. After having
discovered that you can stop a fan, you should try to understand the linearity
(smoothness) of this variation. Try setting to 50%, 75% and the likes. Some
motherboards do not vary fan speeds until when very low values are reached, like
20% or, even 2%. Try setting even 1% and check to see if there is any difference
in speed.