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SilentTek

Now for the crown jewel of this board, SilentTek, a fancy name for smart fan control. The software works very well; there is a definite audible difference in the fan speed noise. This can be set both in the BIOS and through AOpen's included SilentTek Utility. The speed of the fan is controlled according to the temperature of the CPU and it works very well. At a 1/4 fan setting, the fan noise from an open case was barely audible above the ambient noise of the room. There are several settings included; fixed fan control makes sure that the fan is always spinning at a constant rate regardless of heat, Smart Fan Control allows the fan to kick in at a specified temperature, Multiple Level Control allows the user to set the fan speed for a given temperature, and lastly there is the AOpen Recommended Setting. For the Manual Level Control, the only problem is there needs to be a bit of experimentation to find the appropriate fan speed to CPU temperature settings. If the CPU is near a temperature boundary it will throttle up and down and the constant flux in fan speed is actually a lot more distracting than it is at a constant rate.

The AOpen Recommended Setting is quite aggressive as the fan shut off completely while the CPU was idle but runs at full blast when running intensive programs like games. The recommended setting also does not seem to like to slow down after it has sped up. It may have been that it was because I had not waited long enough but the Manual Level Control seems to work much better in that aspect. The BIOS fan control is not nearly as intuitive nor does it have the full manual option. It is recommended that you use the windows SilentTek software as results should be much better.