Workstation fan control

post by deanan on May 24, 2022

How does one control the fans on deep learning workstation. The fans are all over the map. pwmconfig does not get rpms for any of the fans.

post by deanan on May 30, 2022

lm-sensors/fancontrol/pwmconfig all read the fan speed as 0.

adding api_enforce_resources=lax to the grub command doesn’t work as apparently it does for other Asus boards.

post by markd on Jun 10, 2022

On a Workstation it will depend on the specific motherboard and also depend on which fans you want to control.

I would not recommend changing the CPU fans.

For the Workstations fans commonly those are changed in the BIOS or on some Workstation motherboards via IPMI/iKVM.

Normally set up a fan curve for Chassis fans:

• Temperature 1 → Run fan at % speed
• Temperature 2 → Run fan at % speed
• …
• Temperature N → Run fan at 90% or 100% speed

Depending on the motherboard you can see the sensors for temperature and voltage. Desktops do not commonly see the Chassis Fan speeds.

• IPMI if you have a motherboard that supports it.
• lm-sensors

I normally for lm-sensors run:

$ sudo apt install lm-sensors
$ sudo sensors-detect --auto
$ sudo sensors

The issue is most Workstation motherboards do not have configurations or circuitry to do fans:

$ sudo apt install fancontrol
$ sudo pwmconfig

– will often show you

• Note that many motherboards do not have pwm circuitry installed, even if your sensor chip supports pwm.

The following should show you the motherboard:

$ sudo dmidecode -t baseboard