Hey all, got a few issues with my motherboard. ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/Gen-3 (running 3606 BIOS) First problem is the CPU Fan speed. I have a Corsair H80 with SP120 fans in place of the stock ones. They spin at 2,100 RPM no matter what profile I select. The way they are linked is through the unit that house the pump (mounted to the CPU), then from there to the motherboard connection (as per instructions by Corsair). Does anyone know if there is a common issue with using different fans with the H80 or is it something else wrong? Maybe connect the fans directly to the 2 CPU fan points on the motherboard? Also, being the Gen-3 board, I was under the impression that if I used a PCI-E 3.0 card, the system could use a separate controller and allow 3.0, but GPU-Z detects my card as 2.0. It's a EVGA GTX 660. Any light on these matters would be great, as the internet searching isn't being too helpful.
When I used a H80 I had the fans running on the pump and there was barely any difference between any of the profiles in terms of fan speed and noise. I ended up using a molex to fan connector which dropped them from 12v to 5v, in the end and it was fine after that. As for the graphics card, if you are running a Ivy Bridge CPU then you should be getting PCI-E 3.0 speeds, but if your running a Sandy Bridge CPU then you will only get PCI-E 2.0 but apparently there is not much difference between them anyway. I am sure someone else will have some better knowledge about it though.
I was under the impression that the Gen-3 ASUS boards had a seperate controller for the PCI-E 3.0 support. On Ivy Bride systems, it's handled by both the CPU and the chipset, so even if I dropped an i5-3570K in place of my i5-2500K I wouldn't normally see the benifits as the chipset (Z68) doesn't support all the features. I may be completely wrong... Where are the gurus?
PCI-E 3.0 needs an ivybridge cpu for 3.0 afaik. Wont make any difference especially with the bandwith a 660 has. Even my 7970 wont saturate PCI-E 2.0.
Can you not plug those fans into the motherboard and control them there? IIRC the last Intel architecture to have the PCIe controller on the motherboard was the Core2 architecture. Since then alot of what was done by the Northbridge has been moved onto the processor. Storage, RAM, PCI/PCIe, LAN and more. Even if the motherboard is capable of it. You are governed by what controllers are available on the processor. This is why you only see one major chip on the motherboard now and not two. Also the reason there wasn't any dual-channel motherboards with the first generation Core-i processors because they had three memory controllers in them (triple channel). Also the reason why Core-i processors can't be overclocked too much or not at all via the FSB/clock. You start messing with that and you start putting the SATA controller, which is sensitive and on the CPU, out of sync. You're not losing out on much by running it in PCIe 2.0 mode. Maybe 3-4 FPS. You'll only really see a difference if you were running SLi perhaps.