How to control fans on an asus laptop

I'm dual booting Ubuntu 20.04 on an Asus TUF FX505DT laptop and my main problem now is the lack of control of fan speed of my laptop. When I'm on win 10 I can simply press fn+f5 and circle through three modes for fan speed. Silent, performance and turbo (Only if I'm plugged in). And this function is very useful to have as it impacts performance a lot. For example in a game like CSGO if my fan speed mode is set to silent I only get half of the performance I get on turbo. My problem with Ubuntu is that it only seems to run on silent mode. For regular use (browsing, programming, etc..) it's perfect, but for more resource intensive tasks (such as gaming) it's really not that good. So is there a way to have this feature or is it at least possible to make the fans go up to performance/turbo mode when I'm doing more resource intensive tasks? If yes, how?

I'm still very new to Linux, so I really don't know a lot. Any help is appreciated and Thanks in advance.

4 Answers

We have the same laptop model and I also went searching for a way to control the fans the same way as with Armoury Crate since the instructions detailed in the ArchWiki weren't working for me then after quite some time I saw this on a reddit post:

In Kernel 5.6 there is a fan mode for asus laptops, check if you have /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/throttle_thermal_policy 2 - Silent, 0 - Balance, 1 - Turbo, similar to the modes in armoury crate on windows.

I use Manjaro which is already on 5.8 at this time so I tried modifying it and it worked excellently. Here's the reddit post if you want to check it out:

• switch on = $ sudo echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/hwmon/hwmon4/pwm1_enable
• switch off = $ sudo echo 2 > /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb wmi/hwmon/hwmon4/pwm1_enable

please note that you must check which folder contanins pwn1_enable (in my case hwmon4)

Right now, an unofficial open-source kernel module is in development for adding CPU fan control. I've used it on my own laptop, ASUS FX505DT, and it does work well.

This is the link to the project: hackbnw/faustus

Here are some aliases I made for the same. Add them to ~/.bashrc file

alias fan-turbo='cd /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi; sudo sh -c "echo 1 >> fan_boost_mode"; sudo sh -c "echo 1 >> throttle_thermal_policy"; source ~/.bashrc; cd ~;'
alias fan-performance='cd /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi; sudo sh -c "echo 0 >> fan_boost_mode"; sudo sh -c "echo 0 >> throttle_thermal_policy"; source ~/.bashrc; cd ~;'
alias fan-silent='cd /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi; sudo sh -c "echo 2 >> fan_boost_mode"; sudo sh -c "echo 2 >> throttle_thermal_policy"; source ~/.bashrc; cd ~;'

then

source ~/.bashrc

Hope this helps.