Just from another thread:

Quoted from "Weihnachts-Shoggy"

That is not possible and also would not make any sense at all. As you already mentioned the CPU temperature changes very quick and this makes it impossible to use it for fan control. Let's say you start a large program and the CPU is at heavy load for a few seconds. Speeding up the fans for this matter is worthless because the most important thing is your water temperature - the medium which cools your hardware. It will not change at all in this case so it is not necessary to speed up the fans.

If you would do it anyway the fans will go up and down all the time which would be very annoying And in the end it would also have no real effect on your cooling performance.

There are also other reason why we do not offer this option. One massive problem for example is the malfunction handling. Every possible case (system crashes, software crashes, endless loop w/o changing temps etc...) must be programmed into the firmware.

I can understand that it would be a not so very useful feature to automatically control the fans. However it would be nice if there was some kind of plug-in or tab in the Aquasuite which shows the system sensors, just for visual verification and maybe manual fan control.

I now have two applications running in the background for monitoring my system: Aquasuite which controls the fans by it own sensors and ASUS PC Probe (horrible piece of software...) to monitor temps (and maybe voltages when OC'ing). Wouldn't it be wonderful if the Aquasuite could show me those read-outs too? In my opinion it doesn't have to do anything with the data, it would be nice if it just shows it as additional information. It also doesn't have to be shown on the Aquaero selve, just in the software would be great.

at least allowing us to control fans from a delta of 2 aquaero sensors would help a lot. And should be easy to do... it's simple math. Right now, creating a profile based on water temps is crap if your ambient temps vary a lot. This is my main gripe. So I agree with the OP of this thread, that the software is pretty lame, and leaves a lot to be desired.

And in my original thread, someone posted some plugin that didn't really work at all. I wish I could read german so i could understand the other sections of these forums and see how others feel.

edit: and I kinda take back my original reply to your post above about the cpu temps changing quickly making your fans cycle on and off. Since if lets say you could adjust fans by cpu temp, you could have them come on under load, and turn off when at idle. Right now, with just adjusting by water temp doesn't work to well for reasons i mentioned above. If I set a small range of tempature change, based on water temp, to change a big range of fan speed... and ambient temps change 1-2 degrees, it makes your whole profile useless.

Why don't you do this: tape one of the included sensors to the side of your CPU block or the socket, set the delay to 0 and hysteresis to 0, and set that sensor to control your fan. You will see how annoying it is to have the fan directly controlled by CPU temp. And, I might add, that having your fan turn on and off so much could negatively affect its lifespan.

There is one point I do agree with, though. I would love if I had the ability to view the CPU temp reported by coretemp, etc. in the logging so that I can see how the water temps, etc. react to CPU loads. But right now I just export the data to *.csv and then use Everest, Coretemp, etc's CSV values to merge together in Excel and graph it all pretty from there. But it would be nice to view it in Aquasuite.

You don't get it

If the CPU reaches 80° while you bench the water will not realy become much hotter in some seconds. Infact water can absorb a lot of energie bevor getting hotter. And when you control the fans using the CPUTemp, the fans will spin up but the watertemprature is almost the same severel second bevor you start heating up your CPU. So there will be noise by the fans when you don't need more airflow. And your CPU will not reach 80° anyways if your coolingsystem work. When benching a hour or so the water is hotter then bevor and the fans have speed up and more heat will released to cool your CPU.

If Water havent such a great possebility to store enerigie, cooling with water were useless. And only under the conditions that water isn't possible to store energy your thoughts will work

I don't see your point why the information of the water temperature is useless. But lets first go back in in the conduction of water, indeed the conduction is bad... but that would only influence your cooling if you got water that stands still. In a watercooling setup the water normally flows and this is what cools the system. Water can absorb much more heat then air per unit volume which makes it an effective coolant. So if we compare the heat transportation capability of water and air, water wins hands down.

But now back to why the water temperature can be usefull... for a good setup with sufficient flow and good waterblocks there is quite a close relationship between water temperature and components temperature. Due to the thermal resistance between, say, your CPU core and the water (which we can see as a big thermal reservoir we can dump heat in) there will always be a temperature difference between the water and the components. But when your setup is good this difference is not that dependent on the amount of heat being emitted from the CPU core. So we can state that it is approximately constant in a good setup. This when you know your water temperature you in fact know your CPU temperature (of course, always in steady-state otherwise we have to take into account the thermal capacitance of the CPU, waterblock, etc.). So if your water temperature rises one degree, your average CPU temp should go up by a similar amount. Just like when your ambient temperature is higher, your CPU temperature will be higher.

So in my opinion the water temperature is a rather useful piece of information: if it stays constant your CPU temperature should remain constant (if not the waterblock you're using cannot cope with the heat being emitted by the CPU). If your water temperature rises gradually over time you know that the amount of heat put into your water loop cannot be removed by your radiators. Which means that you might need to turn op fan speed (or buy a bigger radiator ).

The nice things is that due to the huge thermal capacity of water it will take some time to heat up. Five minutes of full CPU load will this have a neglect able influence on the water temperature (while in case of a heatsink cooled system your fan will immediately crank up). However, 5 hours of gaming will most likely will have some influence, which means that your fan speed will gradually increase till a new equilibrium is reached.

I don't understand where your objection that CPU temp and water temp are closely correlated comes from...

Lets try to make a simple model of how a system is cooled by either water or air. First lets assume we're working on steady-state conditions, such that we can neglect all thermal capacitance's and only need to take into account thermal resistance. I will model the CPU as a body which generates a specific heat, the water or air I will model as a huge thermal sink at a specific temperature (ambient for air and water temperature when we consider water). Those two are connected with each other with heatsink or waterblock, which acts as transportation medium of the heat from the CPU to the sink and has a certain thermal resistance (and thermal capacitance, but we neglect those). Of course the thermal resistance depends on a whole lot of properties (like temperature, airflow, wateflow, material, surface area, etc.), but lets for the moment assume it is constant. Say it is 0.1 C/W (centigrade per Watt)

CPU (W) -> R -> Ambient/water (T) (the arrows depict the flow of heat)

So if our CPU emits 100 W and the ambient is at T = 25 C we can use the thermal resistance to calculate the CPU temperature which is:W*R + T = 100*0,1 + 25 C = 35 C. As you can see if the ambient increases with 1 degree centigrade, so should in this model increase the CPU temperature. In realty this is ofcourse not the complete story as the thermal resistance of the heatsink/waterblock depends on temperature, but the difference of this for small temperature differences should be rather small. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only an electrical engineer so the amount of courses I followed on thermal modeling was limited.

The fact that a CPU doesn't cool down as fast as a GPU after you stopped gaming is due to the fact that a GPU has little to do when you don't run 3D calculations and will stop emitting a lot of heat almost immediately. Your CPU, however, still will emit a reasonable amount of heat when you remain using the computer for normal use. If your CPU temperature rose way more quickly with watercooling then with aircooling this points to a problem with the waterblock not being able to remove the heat sufficiently. I think that nowadays the circuitry inside the CPU determines the temperature, it is very easy to build a primitive thermal sensor out of a couple of transistors (for instance a PTAT circuit).

I get your point, to control if your cooling is sufficient you indeed need to pay attention to the actual CPU temp, otherwise bad things can and most certainly will happen. But in a setup where you know you can cope with the CPU heat controlling fan speed by water temperature makes sense (I'm currently doing it and it works pretty well).

To simplify everything into a simple sentence:

Just give us temperature delta between sensors.

The we can correctly adjust our setups for load conditions, without having to worry about fluctuating ambient temps affecting water temp.

I just updated my loop to increase flow and I now have an equivalent of 5x 120 mm rad area... but I cool my CPU, GPUs (have a dedicated PhysX card), Mobo and power regulation.

My CPU is always under full load as I'm running BOINC, so I cannot commend on how fast temperature rises between idle and full... as idle doesn't exist for my poor CPU . It is now running for half an hour and water temperature is 23 C while CPU is 41 C. Yesterday after 2-3 hours the water was 24 C, and I think CPU around 42 C or something. With my previous setup with a much lower flow rate and cooling capacity water temps were 30-32 C under only CPU load and the CPU was around 50+ C. If haven't tried gaming yet with the system, but I certainly know that the water temperature will increase a few degree. However, my radiator fans are linearly scaled to water temperature (with a minimum of 35% power, of course) so that should level out the water temperature increase at some point. Alarm settings are set for 35 C for my water, if that happens I know something is wrong and I have enough time to shut down.

And for air cooling I would measure case temperature somewhere in the vicinity of the CPU, but preferably outside the air flow of the CPU fan.

Don't know if your still unhappy with your Aquaero, but if you are I would be willing to take it off your hands.

P.S. I got a pair of Zalman fan controllers I will trade you for.

Just a quick question to you Byffycor, which way are your fans blowing? That is, how are your radiators mounted, and are you blowing the air into or out of your case (over the rads)?
I ask, since I once mounted my fans the wrong way, which was blowing air into my case over my rads, and thus recirculating the heat into my case, leading tho an ever increasing temperature.
My aquaro and multiswich is now controlling 6 fans (3+2+1 rads), keeping my rig steady at water temps around ~28C, cpu at 38 idle/50 full load (AMD 965BE@4,05) and GPU at 45/50 (Ati 5970 @900/1200). I also cool the chipset, rams and my two poweradjust in the same loop.
drbo