bobsterlobster

What a blast from the past. I still remember seeing it for the first time on my Socket A Athlon 1900+ pc.

>Did you buy this board already broken?

Honestly I have no idea what this board has been through before getting to me. It had the PWM/Temp/RPM issue from the moment I got it. Maybe someone did break the chip. I'm gonna look up that diagram and try to see if the pin is connected to ground

I see, I see. That's an impressive amount of digging you did. Thanks for that. Think I could wire pin 88 to ground and basically fix it?

Even if I do get it fully fixed, I think my project could be useful for motherboards that have thermal probes but no PWM.

Real talk though, I'd love to see this MSI board fully operational.

Will do. Might be worth to look into it a little deeper.

There's only one page for my board: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/970-GAMING/support

And I've tried a couple of versions available there. I was even able to find some beta/unreleased bioses that I've also tested. Unfortunately, none of them enable fan control or fix temp & fan speed monitoring.

Your hunch is correct, I did not test the PS/2, serial or parallel ports, and I'm only using USB.

If windows crashes, then the audio generation crashes, so the fan will start to operate without PWM. Should default to 100%. At least that's how the PWM fans I have behave when the PWM signal suddenly disappears.

Interesting idea, I'll look into it.

I am not controlling a single fan though. It's wired to a fan hub, so the PWM signal is sent to all the fans in the system. I also wrote a companion windows application that reads CPU temps using PawnIO or HWiNFO which follow a curve that the user sets, and it sends the proper duty cycle to the arduino.

It's not just a dumb fan controller that I could've bought off aliexpress.

Not sure how LLMs failed me, please elaborate.

Also not sure how you found that model number, it's literally an F71878AD, here's proof: https://www.modders-inc.com/wp-content/uploads/image/2015/02... Taken from here: https://www.modders-inc.com/msi-970-gaming-mobo/2/

I can show you a HWiNFO screenshot of it not reading anything off the SuperIO except Chassis Intrusion: https://imgur.com/a/dYPETWz

The only way I can get a temperature reading is off the CPU probe directly, which I am already making use of. As the article covers in later parts, I'm using HWiNFO and/or PawnIO to do exactly what you say (reading off the CPU probe sensor) and feed it into a fan curve, which then sends the appropriate duty cycle to the arduino.

In the BIOS there's no temperature reading, no fan speed display, and no PWM control whatsoever.

So maybe MSI did wire up the SuperIO, I can't say for sure, but they definitely didn't wire up something, otherwise the BIOS could at least control the fans or see their RPM.

And I've also tried with multiple BIOS versions, so it can't be BIOS related.

Some people online had working sensors on their MSI 970 boards, some didn't, leading me to believe it must've been a defective batch where they forgot something.

Image of an MSI 970 Gaming bios where temp and fans work properly: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?attachments/msi_snapshot_...

MSI shipped a genuinely good motherboard and forgot to wire one chip, so PWM doesn't work. Instead of tossing the board or living with the noise, I decided to make lemonade.

An Arduino Nano generates the 25kHz PWM signal, and a companion Windows application reads CPU temp and sends the duty cycle over serial. The Arduino firmware is open source (MIT).

Maybe you're right. After all, I haven't lived countless centuries, so I have no idea what it's like. But I believe life gives life meaning, and we can agree to disagree on that.

Still, curing aging doesn't mean defeating death. There's infinite ways it can end for you, and aging is just one of them (not a great one, in my opinion).

My take is that current lifespans are way too short, and at the very least people should be able to halt their aging. And when they want to go, they should be allowed to.

Not aging does not mean infinite life. Not only can you end it whenever you want, but you can still have accidents or win a Darwin Award.

Also, longer lifespans open up space exploration and so much more. Anyway, I don't know if I want infinite life, but I definitely want us to beat aging, it sucks from every possible point.

Why do people use The Last Answer by Isaac Asiimov to justify that dying is ok? If anything I find it a great reason to not like the idea of an afterlife.

But living as a human, you can do so much more than just thinking.

why's that?

I agree with you that there's some friction involved and a bunch of trade-offs.

The thing is that I absolutely lost it, because of the bugs and the ads, and just wanted something reliable that doesn't nag me all the time.

I know that other people's linux experience may be radically different due to different hardware, so I'll consider myself lucky it all worked out.

I don't think it's Stockholm Syndrome, rather it's a classic case of sunken cost fallacy. For me at least, that's what it was. I had invested so much time in Ableton (~14 years) and didn't feel like starting from scratch with another DAW. And let's be real, no one likes that kind of friction.

It had to get worse to finally break the inertia and also make me realize that it's only going downhill.

Thank you! Sadly, the one I posted is outdated too. I tried looking around for the newest one because I had seen it before, but couldn't find it anymore. The list was ~30% longer.

lol! Sorry about the clickbait. Everyone's doing it nowadays, and I wanted to follow. Gonna think of a better title next time

Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and something percent. That's where I pulled the number from. But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over for the Linux community.

At this point I'd say it's more of a "would" than a "could"

Yeah, until microsoft says "Sup there lil buddy? Running an unsupported system? Oof. The next update is gonna really turn it inside-out"

Honestly that's what it feels like when something breaks. Linux - you see what's wrong, you fix it, it's done

Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update

I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming.

I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.

Awesome, good to know that, and glad to be here

Uninstalled with DDU, switched to multiple versions back. But it wasn't the nvidia driver, and I proved that when I switched to an insider build and the flickers were gone :D

Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if it was still stuck at 1%, but it's growing, and the rate of growth has been increasing too.

The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I mentioned in the article. They do have to fix VKD3D performance though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel/Nvidia hardware when playing DX12 games.

I was using WSL for the longest time.

Nah, I think it's awesome. Great computer by the way. With all that raw power I bet you were doing tons of computering.