Hot hardware is unhappy hardware, and with temperatures soaring to new highs across the globe, where you place your PC’s fans plays a crucial part in how efficiently your precious components perform. This guide will explain how to set up your PC fans for the best cooling performance—because you didn’t stand in line for days to get your expensive new graphics card just for it to thermal throttle, after all. (Thermal considerations also affect Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming PC, but you can’t move its internal fans around, alas.)
There are a few important concepts you should be aware of when it comes to optimizing the best PC fan setup. Let’s tackle them one by one. The knowledge should flow in quickly—just like the air in a well-configured system.
Let’s start with the basics. How you point your fans determines whether it sucks in cool air or spits hot air out of your system. Some fans will have an arrow indicating the correct flow direction. If they don’t, a good rule of thumb is that air will almost always flow in from the front, where the branding sticker generally is. Air exits out of the back, where the technical information may be written about the fan. Our guide to telling which way your PC fan is blowing can help if you need it.
The type of fan matters too, though much less so than having them all configured in the right way. Fans with higher static pressure are ideal for moving air through dense water-cooling radiators. Fans with high airflow are great as intake or exhaust on your case as they can move large amounts of air.
When fans pull in more air than they push out of a PC case, it creates positive pressure. Negative pressure pulls more air out, often creating a vacuum effect. For optimal cooling performance in a standard system, you want to be slightly more on the positive airflow side. (This setup usually results in more dust entering your PC, which you can mitigate with dust filters or more frequent cleaning.)
How do you achieve positive airflow? Easy: Just have more intake than exhaust fans, or run your intake fans slightly faster than your exhaust if they’re in equal number. Speaking of…
Intake and exhaust placements might be the single most crucial concept for proper fan placement. The idea is simple: Fresh cool air in, hot air out. You generally want to have both intake and exhaust fans. (There can be exceptions to this, such as in small form factor builds.)
Example A: Let’s choose the popular Lian Li O11 Dynamic case. A solid fan configuration would include intake fans on the bottom, and exhaust fans on top, as shown in the image above. Fresh air will enter the case, cooling your components. Hot air generated by your hardware rises and will leave through the top exhaust fans.
For Example B, let’s look at a more traditional case, the Be Quiet Silent Base 802. A optimal fan configuration would include intake fans on the front of the case. You’ll also want to add the top exhaust fans. Including an exhaust fan on the rear of the case will round out an optimal setup.
A configuration like that will let cool air enter in the front, while the hot air from the CPU and GPU then exhausts on the top and rear of the case.
In a standard desktop PC, you want at least one intake and one exhaust fan. Some cheaper cases only include a single intake fan on the front of the PC, or a single exhaust fan at the rear. Spend a couple bucks for another fan so you have both.
Fans placed at the front of your liquid-cooler’s radiator with airflow going from front to back will be “pushing” air into your system. If you flip the fans and place them behind the radiator, they’re now “pulling” air in through your liquid-cooler. (Like the picture above)
Which setup is optimal? Most tests show a negligible difference in push vs pull, but we can give a slight nod to “push.” Generally this will work best in most case setups, and give you efficient performance.
AIO liquid cooler: If you’re cooling your CPU with an AIO, optimal setups include placing the radiator in the front or top of your case. Both work just fine. To prioritize the GPU cooling, you’d place the CPU AIO on top of the case as an exhaust. This will make the CPU slightly warmer, but your GPU will stay cooler.
Tower air cooler
With a traditional tower air cooler, you’d optimally want the fan located on the cooler’s heatsink pushing air towards the rear exhaust of the case. In the example above, the open shroud GPU will also exhaust hot air upwards—a typical setup for a gaming rig. This will slightly increase your CPU temperatures when using an air cooler; you can reduce the heat levels with optimal fan airflow.
Standard open shroud GPUs exhaust a lot of hot air into your case—even more than your CPU if it’s a powerful graphics card. What can you do to maximize cooling and airflow?
If your case allows it, install fans pushing air upwards towards your GPU on the bottom. This will give cool air directly to the intake fans on the GPU itself. If your case doesn’t allow that configuration, have a front intake fan coupled with proper top or rear exhaust fans, as described previously. Again: You always want at least one intake and one exhaust fan in your system, and that goes double if it’s a gaming rig.
There are two final important items to consider. First, case choice can aid tremendously in optimal fan airflow. Our explainer on buying the perfect PC case can help, though you should be good if you follow these general guidelines:
Second, utilize fan controllers to pinpoint the best noise to performance ratio that you can find. Most midrange to high-end motherboards include fan software either in their BIOS or as a Windows application. Example of this is the Asus Ai Suite 3. You can set your CPU and case temperatures based on actual thermals, which can give you quiet performance. Likewise, the fans can ramp up when needed to make sure everthing stays cool.
If you want more advanced control of your fan curves, hardware controllers from Aquacomputer, Corsair, and EKWB also exist that allow you to fine tune fan curves even further. You can also base the fan speeds on the GPU or use thermal sensors with these more advanced units, but they’re overkill for most people.
And there you have it: You now know everything needed to optimally position your fans for the best cooling performance. Our guides to checking your CPU temperature and your graphics card’s GPU temperature can help you confirm everything is running smoothly. May your temperatures be low!
Typically, CPU fan noises are heard when you reboot your PC (the whirring sound you may have heard upon startup) and it goes on to decline as the startup process completes. The purpose of fans on your CPU is to blow off the heat that your processor may generate when a process is going through. You may have felt your PC getting hot when it’s riddled with many windows and applications, and it subsequently cooled down in a while; it’s the fans at play. In this article, we will be discussing how you can control the speed of your CPU fans on Windows.
The mechanism of CPU fans is pretty straightforward. They keep a periodic check on your PC’s temperature and get turned on and off accordingly. Every PC has air vents to allow the heat to escape. If you find your CPU fans to be running constantly, it’s a sign that your system is overloading, and that may cause problems with your power adapter, too. Thus, it can be very important to maintain a balance with the CPU fan speed while also keeping your PC’s temperature in check.
Your computer fan may rev up due to excessive heat as it works to cool down internal components. This can occur when running intensive programs or if airflow is obstructed. Additionally, accumulated dust can hinder performance, prompting fans to work harder.
You can check, control, increase, monitor or change the CPU Fan Speed safely in Windows 11/10 by following these steps. Here, we will be primarily discussing how you can keep your CPU fan speed in check using the Control Panel, your PC’s BIOS control, or a third-party fan controller SpeedFan.
Here’s how you can access fan control settings in your Control Panel:
Save these changes by clicking on Apply and you can then exit the window. The System Cooling option is absent in Windows 11 computers, so if you’re using that version of the Windows OS then you should go for the second and third ways.
Read: Best Laptop cooling software.
The Advanced Startup option BIOS has fan controlling settings in it which may differ based on your computer. Here’s how you can access and modify those settings:
How to open BIOS settings
How to use BIOS
Read: Best practices to keep your computer cool.
The free app SpeedFan can help you find the cause behind a heightened CPU fan speed with ease. It searches your computer for informative chips and puts up voltages, speeds, and temperatures on display (things that your BIOS may fall short on). SpeedFan’s technology known as S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) runs through your motherboard and video cards to extract relevant data. Here’s how you can use it.
The Response curve plots down the PC’s temperature and the relevant fan speed. The upward-sloping graph suggests that higher temperature leads to higher fan speed, but you can configure that to your liking.
There are several free fan speed controller software like SpeedFan and HWinFo, so if you don’t find its interface or control effective enough, you have got other options. If you’re looking to go overboard, you can always purchase an external fan hub (for your desktop) or a cooling pad for your laptop.
Note: The CPU Fan error is usually triggered when you’ve turned on your PC. As such, the fan error occurs before Windows 10 OS boots and is probably caused due to some hardware issue, and It may not be due to overheating. The most common cause why a CPU fan would run at full speed is that its sensor is not working properly. The solution here is to replace the fan itself. But you need to see that the processor is not always hot. You can use third-party applications for this purpose. These posts will help you if a CPU Fan Speed Error is detected or your CPU Fan runs at full speed always. You may want to also to check your PC’s total power consumption.
If your Fan speed increases automatically and randomly in Windows 11/10, immediately open the Task Manager when this happens and see which process is consuming high CPU or another resource. Once you have identified this, you must find out why that is happening. If that does not help, clean your fan and keep it dust-fee or take it to a technician to check it out.
Your CPU fan may ramp up due to overheating or dust accumulation. If the processor’s temperature rises above normal, the fan increases speed for cooling. Subsequently, it slows when the temperature stabilizes.
However, your PC fan may speed up unexpectedly due to underlying processes such as software updates, background tasks, or antivirus scans, even if you’re not actively using resource-heavy applications.
Open your UEFI and head to the Monitor section. Here you can see the fan speeds and temperature. Alternatively, you can use a free third-party temperature and fan monitoring tool like SpeedFan to check your PC’s fan speed.
There are mainly three different ways to adjust your fan speed on your computer. For example, you can do that using Control Panel, BIOS/UEFI, and third-party software. In case you want to use a third-party tool, you can opt for SpeedFan. On the other hand, you need to look for the Processor power management setting in the Power Options to get the job done.
Read next: How to make your computer run like new again.