Where should I place my fan probes to control case fans?

[earwicker7]

My case has five fans (1 front, 1 rear, 1 side, and 2 top) and my fan controller has five probes. Anyone have any ideas as to where these should go? Would I just be measuring ambient temperature in the areas around the fans, since all of them are just designed to move cold air in and hot air out? In other words, since I'm only controlling case fans, none of the fans are blowing directly into the heatsink, so I wouldn't need to probe the CPU, correct? Or do I have this all wrong?

 

[Slaymate]

I would use the probes, or a few of them, but I would not use them to control any fan speeds. I would use the probe temps as a general gauge of the systems health. As an example. I would tape a probe to the top of the base of my cpu heatsink, here's a picture.

With a probe located here it won't tell you your actual cpu temperature, but you can use it as a reference point. You can then run a few load tests and make a rough correlation between the temperature reported by the probe and the temperature reported by a Utility like HWMonitor.

Once you position all your probes and finish all your basic temperature tests you can then start testing what the effects are on individual components by adjusting your fan speeds, using your controller.

 

[earwicker7]

How about this... hard drive, memory heat sink, cpu heat sink, graphics card, and ambient temperature at the top of the case? If these seem good, where would I put the sensor on the hard drive (SSD) and graphics card?

 

[Slaymate]

Your SSD shouldn't get hot. What graphics card did you get? You'll probably need to remove the cover to find a good spot for it. I would hook one of the probes to the NB heatsink (mobo).

 

[earwicker7]

I got two XFX 5970 2GB Black Editions. There are two exposed chips (I'm guessing they're the GPUs), so I was thinking of attaching the probe to the mounting bracket (also exposed).

Good call on the SSD... d'oh, no moving parts!

 

[Slaymate]

can you post a picture of one of your 5970's showing this exposed chip?

 

[earwicker7]

It looks similar to this, but there are two on each card:

 

[Slaymate]

That is the backside of the gpu You don't want to place the probe were it can ground any of the connections together and you don't want to use much tape to keep the probe in place. Their leaving that space open so the heat can escape, tape will prevent the heat from dissipating so use just a super small piece if you have to. This is the best tape you can get Tape of the Gods
If you want to actually monitor your card you'll need 2 probes per card.