A plugin for Fan Control to add support for the Acer Predator Orion 3000 PO3-640 CPU and case fans. The GPU fans can already be controlled independently by Fan Control.
This plugin works by reading from and writing directly to the correct registers in the Embedded Controller (EC) on the motherboard. This approach is inspired by NoteBook FanControl.
Contains the source code from Soberia/EmbeddedController, used under the BSD 3-Clause License. The license and modified source code are present in the ECLibrary directory.
Warning
This plugin uses the extremely powerful and potentially exploitable WinRing0x64 driver, which may be flagged by Windows Defender.
Fan Control used to use this driver via LibreHardwareMonitorLib, which has now switched to another driver called PawnIO. If I have a chance, I'll try to switch this plugin over - otherwise, use it at your own risk
Acer's own PredatorSense also has this driver in its program files, but I don't know if it actually uses it.
The default configuration will work on systems which match mine exactly. Otherwise, you will need to modify the config file (located at <your Fan Control installation>\Plugins\Acer-PO3-640\config.toml after installation).
In principle, you could configure this plugin for many other systems which use the EC for fan control (including many laptops), as described in the configuration guide here. However, I likely won't be able to support you for devices other than the Predator Orion 3000 desktops.
Check your motherboard model with the following command:
wmic baseboard get product
If your motherboard is the Predator PO3-640, then the register addresses in the default configuration will be correct.
Otherwise, you'll need to complete the first section of the configuration guide to find the correct registers. If you don't do this, you risk overwriting random information in the Embedded Controller. Do not set a curve on any Control provided by this plugin until you are sure the registers in the config file are correct!
Unless you have the same fans as I do (or ones with similar RPM ranges), this plugin will likely run them inefficiently or at limited speeds.
My fans are:
- CPU Fan: Noctua NF-A9, the one that comes with the popular Noctua NH-U9S cooler (rated 400-2000 rpm, tested 500-2000)
- Front Case Fan: Stock Acer FrostBlade (tested 600-3400 rpm)
- Back Case Fan: Stock Acer FrostBlade (tested 800-3400 rpm, didn't go as low as the front fan)
If you have a different fan setup, use the speeds provided by the manufacturer or complete the second section of the configuration guide to find the speeds your fans work at in practice.
- Ensure you have a .NET 8.0 (or greater) version of Fan Control installed. Open the About tab in Fan Control. If it says NET 4.8 you'll need to download the .NET 10.0 version from the official repo.
- Download this plugin's latest .zip file from the latest release.
- In Fan Control, go to Settings -> Plugins -> Install Plugin and select the downloaded .zip file.
- Exit Fan Control, edit the
<your Fan Control installation>\Plugins\Acer-PO3-640\config.tomlfile as necessary, then relaunch it. Now you should be able to pair the relevant new Controls and Speed Sensors, and set your CPU/case fans to follow a curve.
Important
You need to enable the Predator Service for this plugin to work, so make sure to re-enable it if you've disabled it. I've obviously missed some initialisation step it does.
You can leave the "Fan Control" tab in PredatorSense on the Auto or Custom setting, it shouldn't matter. The Gaming setting overrides this plugin to set the fans to their maximum speed.
If not, this plugin will not work. See the section above.
I have this disabled. While this should only change what happens before PredatorSense launches, try disabling it if you are running into issues. It is located under Advanced -> PC Health Status.
Your configuration may be invalid. Open <your Fan Control installation>\log.txt and look for lines starting with [Acer-PO3-640] to help diagnose the issue. The number of valid sensors read from the config file (or a fatal error) should be logged at every startup like this:
[Acer-PO3-640][Debug] Loaded config file: 3 speed sensors, 3 control sensors
If you see a line like the following:
[Acer-PO3-640][Warning] Fan 2 in your config.toml file is invalid, so will not appear in Fan Control.
You are missing one of the required properties in the relevant fan (counted from the top of the config file), or the property isn't correctly formatted (it is a string when it should be a number or vice versa / it's surrounded in quotes when it shouldn't be or vice versa).
Open an issue and I'll try to help you solve your problem. Or enlist your local C# expert to look at my noob quality code. Or install Visual Studio, fork this repository and mess around till your problem is fixed, then submit your fix as a PR!
The project contains three programs:
- FanControl.Acer-PO3-640, a C# .NET 8.0 project that builds the main plugin DLL, containing the Fan Control plugin interace implementations and the fan speed calculation logic. Contained within the AcerPlugin directory.
- ECLibrary, a C++17 project that builds the ECLibrary.dll file, containing the third-party module to interface with the EC's memory across various files, the vulnerable WinRing0x64 driver, and my own DLL exports to make interop work in dllmain.cpp.
- TestApp, a C# .NET 8.0 program that tests the ECLibrary.dll file and can write to any EC register. Place the ECLibrary.dll and WinRing0x64.sys files in the folder
Plugins\Acer-PO3-640\relative to the built program.
I'm a noob to C# and C++. Don't judge the code quality too hard! Since I was able to build these programs in Visual Studio without too much effort, I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out. If you make any cool additions/modifications, submit a PR!