> Extra cost (both in design and manufacture), new potential point of failure (both for manufacture and in the field)
"But the BOM" is a tired trope in any discussion about "why can't it do X?". My money would be where my mouth is. But HW manufacturers routinely make design decisions that are simple negatives.
Motherboard manufacturers, in particular. Mobo marketing is focused on colors and flashy effects instead of on quality of production and actual function, beyond a bare minimum of tech specification. AFAICT the products are indistinguishable as no attempt is made to stand out.
> when the CPU failing was already a single point of failure for the machine
… and so is the RAM, the disk, the GPU, the northbridge, the southbridge, the eastbridge…
That's not a valid rationale for "let's a adopt a fundamentally flawed design".
> Have you actually seen one of these that noticably bogs down the fan-driving firmware/drivers and causing issues?
"Fan-driving firmware" is essentially the suggestion. It's what I haven't got.
> I've had fan failures. I've had plenty of hardware controlled fans go full apeshit 100% power to the point of being not merely a nuisance, but a problem (audio, vibration, wear+tear, ...).
No; in my current rigs 10 year lifespan, the fans have been run continuously at 100%, and no fan failures.
The noise, of course, is a nuisance. That's why I'm looking for something that can control the fans in response to temperature, such that the fans can be driven at a temperature-appropriate RPM.
But without doing that in userspace, where the controller might just "die" or effectively die, for any number of reasons, outlined earlier.
> But I don't think I've seen so much as a blog post about the CPU getting so starved that it can't spin up the CPU fans.
I couldn't find any posts reasoning about anything. Either it's not a problem, or just nobody is thinking.
> and that extra hardware or engineering for a minor improvement to a "purely theoretical" failure mode doesn't sound like it'd pay for itself.
Yeah, I was just trying to learn before attempting, literally, "IDK, try it and see if you trip the critical temp cutoff."
Yeah, no doubt the various hardware safeties will save you (although it might put some undue stress on stuff to be at >100℃…) but it might also leave you with a rather hard-to-debug situation if you start experiencing stalls or shutdowns.
… and it's only in desktops that this problem seems to exist. On every laptop I've owned, fan control is in response to temp. (And not handled in userspace, although I presume I could download any of the various fan control programs and have it be that way, but the point is that the HW is, out of the box, doing the sane thing.)
"But the BOM" is a tired trope in any discussion about "why can't it do X?". My money would be where my mouth is. But HW manufacturers routinely make design decisions that are simple negatives.
Motherboard manufacturers, in particular. Mobo marketing is focused on colors and flashy effects instead of on quality of production and actual function, beyond a bare minimum of tech specification. AFAICT the products are indistinguishable as no attempt is made to stand out.
> when the CPU failing was already a single point of failure for the machine
… and so is the RAM, the disk, the GPU, the northbridge, the southbridge, the eastbridge…
That's not a valid rationale for "let's a adopt a fundamentally flawed design".
> Have you actually seen one of these that noticably bogs down the fan-driving firmware/drivers and causing issues?
"Fan-driving firmware" is essentially the suggestion. It's what I haven't got.
> I've had fan failures. I've had plenty of hardware controlled fans go full apeshit 100% power to the point of being not merely a nuisance, but a problem (audio, vibration, wear+tear, ...).
No; in my current rigs 10 year lifespan, the fans have been run continuously at 100%, and no fan failures.
The noise, of course, is a nuisance. That's why I'm looking for something that can control the fans in response to temperature, such that the fans can be driven at a temperature-appropriate RPM.
But without doing that in userspace, where the controller might just "die" or effectively die, for any number of reasons, outlined earlier.
> But I don't think I've seen so much as a blog post about the CPU getting so starved that it can't spin up the CPU fans.
I couldn't find any posts reasoning about anything. Either it's not a problem, or just nobody is thinking.
> and that extra hardware or engineering for a minor improvement to a "purely theoretical" failure mode doesn't sound like it'd pay for itself.
Yeah, I was just trying to learn before attempting, literally, "IDK, try it and see if you trip the critical temp cutoff."
Yeah, no doubt the various hardware safeties will save you (although it might put some undue stress on stuff to be at >100℃…) but it might also leave you with a rather hard-to-debug situation if you start experiencing stalls or shutdowns.
… and it's only in desktops that this problem seems to exist. On every laptop I've owned, fan control is in response to temp. (And not handled in userspace, although I presume I could download any of the various fan control programs and have it be that way, but the point is that the HW is, out of the box, doing the sane thing.)