When you are using your computer, its various components get heated up and are in the need of always being cooled down. This is why all computers have many fans working inside the system to cool one or more regions or components. The largest of these fans is possibly the cooler fan installed on top of the CPU chip on the motherboard. The job of the CPU cooler fan is to keep the CPU chip cool. This is required because if the temperature crosses a certain threshold, the system will not work as expected, it will become slow and could hang up or shut down, and it can even cause some damage to some of the components.
Depending on the computer and motherboard inside it, you can have one or more cooling fans installed. Using an open-source software called FanCtrl you can not only view the current status of the various fans installed on your PC, but you can also control their behavior and speed.
FanCtrl works best with the Gigabyte motherboards, but you can always try your luck. In its small user interface, it displays data retrieved from two different types of sensors – thermal sensors and the fan speed sensors. You can view the current temperature of the CPU, GPU, motherboard and hard disk drive using FanCtrl. It can also let you set the speed of various fans (only if it is allowed). For example, you can set the CPU cooler fan to be run at 50% of its full capacity.
If it does not work as expected, or does not display the fan speed data for your system, you can change the libraries used to fetch the fan speeds and control their speeds. You can switch away from Gigabyte libraries if you are not using a Gigabyte motherboard. Similarly, you can switch between OpenHardwareMonitor and LibreHardwareMonitor and see which of them works best for you.
Among other things, you can choose the temperature unit to be used, the time frequency to update the data, and you can even make it show the data in the OSD style format. It is a great little utility to have that is useful when you want to monitor your system temperature and the status of PC fans.
You can download FanCtrl from https://github.com/lich426/FanCtrl.