In the BIOS, before booting the OS, the speed of the CPU and chassis fans are reported. Typically, the CPU fan is around 1700 r/m, while the chassis fan is roughly half that. When I run "sensors" on a host with a M5A78L motherboard, it reports a single value, a speed which seems to be the CPU fan, twice. Both as CPU and chassis fan. When I look at the hardware monitor directly in the BIOS however, I do get different speeds. The CPU fan speed is mostly slightly above 2000, while the chassis fan speed is in the order 840-845. This happens on a Fedora 17 system with the fillowing package versions: lm_sensors-3.3.2-2.fc17.x86_64 kernel-3.5.1-1.fc17.x86_64 This is a typical output of "sensors": atk0110-acpi-0 Adapter: ACPI interface Vcore Voltage: +1.00 V (min = +0.85 V, max = +1.60 V) +3.3 Voltage: +3.25 V (min = +2.97 V, max = +3.63 V) +5 Voltage: +4.98 V (min = +4.50 V, max = +5.50 V) +12 Voltage: +12.08 V (min = +10.20 V, max = +13.80 V) CPU FAN Speed: 1748 RPM (min = 600 RPM, max = 7200 RPM) CHASSIS FAN Speed: 1748 RPM (min = 600 RPM, max = 7200 RPM) CPU Temperature: +41.0°C (high = +60.0°C, crit = +95.0°C) MB Temperature: +37.0°C (high = +45.0°C, crit = +75.0°C) fam15h_power-pci-00c4 Adapter: PCI adapter power1: 26.11 W (crit = 95.04 W) k10temp-pci-00c3 Adapter: PCI adapter temp1: +13.2°C (high = +70.0°C) (crit = +83.5°C, hyst = +80.5°C) radeon-pci-0100 Adapter: PCI adapter temp1: +48.5°C I reported this first as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=848536 but Hans de Goede suggested this might be a more appropriate place. He suggested a couple of things. I should check if I had the latest BIOS. And I found there had indeed been a new BIOS version released earlier this month. (Built last month, obviously.) Updating BIOS always makes me nervous, but I plucked up my courage and did it. It doesn't seem to make any difference. (The CPU fan might be kept at a slightly higher speed with the new BIOS. But the problems I report here remain.) Hans de Goede also suggested I should do some experiments with different loads. I have done that too now, both before the BIOS upgrade and then repeated afterwards. First I started four sha1sum:s keeping the machine's 4 cores busy. This made the CPU fan increase as expected, but the chassis fan continued to read exactly the same as the CPU fan. It saw a bit above 2700 r/m at most. Then I lowered to just one sha1sum. I thought it might give a reading in-between. At that load, the fan ran at a bit above 2100 r/m. And the chassis fan always exactly the same as the CPU fan. (If you hurry, you can see the result of my tests at http://www.uddeborg.se/mrtg/freddi.fan.html Don't trust anything before Sunday. I discovered the SNMP numbers had changed in some update, so the readings before that didn't pick up the right values. I fixed that just before midnight Saturday evening.) (In the Fedora bug report I also mentioned the core voltage, but as Hans de Goede suspected, that is just because the CPU uses lower values when unloaded. Under load, that value increased to what the BIOS says.) As a bit of extra data, here are some excerpts from dmidecode: BIOS Information Vendor: American Megatrends Inc. Version: 1201 Release Date: 07/18/2012 Base Board Information Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC. Product Name: M5A78L Processor Information Socket Designation: AM3R2 Version: AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor Voltage: 1.4 V And from the manual: Chipset AMD® 760G (780L) / SB710 _______________________________________________ lm-sensors mailing list lm-sensors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors