In addition to tanking your performance with thermal throttling, heat poses a huge threat to the lifespan of your PC. Luckily, most operating systems, including Windows 11, allow you to set a fan profile using BIOS settings, OEM software, or third-party apps.
Third-party applications are generally the most effective solution as they have easy-to-use interfaces and allow you to set individual profiles for all your fans. Fan Control is one such app that offers plenty of customizability to control your cabinet, GPU, and CPU fans, making it the perfect cooling management tool for beginners and experts alike. And in this beginner’s guide, we’ll go over the process of setting up Fan Control to help you create the perfect fan profile for your system.
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Downloading Fan Control
Starting Fan Control is easy as you can run the application right after extracting it.
- Download the portable version of Fan Control from the official website
- Start the app by running FanControl.exe with admin privileges.
- Choose the Temperature sensors by checking the toggles next to their names and press OK.
- Fan Control will run a series of tests to determine the start and stop RPM thresholds of your case, CPU, and GPU fans.
After Fan Control finishes the calibration tests, it will boot into its home screen where all your system fans are displayed.
Typically, Fan #1 will denote the air cooler/liquid cooler plugged into the CPU header of your motherboard. The rest of the fan controls, labeled Fan #2 to Fan #5 will refer to the fans installed in your chassis. Also, Fan Control may display one or two channels depending on your Nvidia GPU.
Unfortunately, Fan Control does not natively support newer AMD GPUs. If your system has an AMD GPU, you may need to install an experimental plugin called FanControl.ADLX.
Configuring manual control
The most basic fan speed setting provided by Fan Control is manual control, where you can modify the RPM of each fan. To use it,
- Enable the Curve toggle under the Controls section for the fan of your choice.
- Click on three dots and choose Manual control from the drop-down menu.
- Dragging the slider to the left will decrease the fan RPM while moving it toward the right to increase the fan speed.
When setting your fan speed manually, you have the option of running the fans at maximum RPM. However, doing so will increase the noise generated by the fans. It will also reduce their lifespan by wearing the fans down at a faster rate.
Setting up a fan curve
Fan Control offers seven fan curve types to meet your cooling needs. For first-time users, I would recommend using a Graph fan curve as it is easy to set up and highly efficient at managing your fan speeds.
- Click the Curve toggle to enable the fan curve settings for a case, CPU, or GPU fan.
- Press the + (plus) icon in the bottom right corner of the app and pick Add “Graph” fan curve.
- Click on the Temperature Source arrow and choose either the CPU, motherboard, or GPU temperature as the metric to control your fan speeds.
- Click on the Edit button to open a detailed view of the Graph curve.
- Left-click on the graph to add a new node. You drag it around to set the fan speed for a specific temperature range. Press the OK button after tweaking the fan curve.
- Select the Graph curve you just created for one of your fans.
- Repeat the process to create different fan curves for the remaining fans.
Ideally, you should set a steep fan curve instead of a straight line for all your system fans. If you set a fan curve with linear increments, your fans will constantly change speeds because your PC temperature fluctuates during normal operation. This will result in sudden jumps in the noise level every once in a while.
If you’re into overclocking your GPU or love playing graphically-intensive games, I’d suggest picking the GPU temperature as the temperature source for your case fans. You can also link your CPU temperature with the case fans if your system is geared toward more processor-intensive tasks.
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That being said, you should never use the motherboard temperature to control your case fans. Unlike the CPU and GPU, your motherboards will never hit extremely high temperatures even under heavy load, meaning the fans won’t be able to run at high speeds even if the rest of the components run hot.
Saving the fan configuration
After you’re done setting the fan curve for the other components, it’s time to save your fan profile.
- Click on the three dots located in the top right corner of the screen.
- Choose the Save configuration option from the drop-down menu.
Keeping your PC nice and cool with Fan Control
Manually setting the fan curves for your PC involves plenty of trial and error. Since constantly running your fans at high speeds can reduce their lifespan on top of making your system sound like a jet-engine, I suggest starting out with the fan curve at low RPM before tweaking it as per your noise tolerance, location, and workload.
If you plan to build a new PC, be sure to pick out a decent CPU cooler along with a case with good airflow to avoid overheating your system.