Fan management
We have summarized the fan control specs for each of the motherboards. Remember, PWM fans are 4-pin and DC fans are 3-pin.
Here, again, all the motherboards differ. Gigabyte is alone in providing both 4 and 3-pin control options on its processor port (thermostatic control works with a 3-pin fan connected to a 4-pin connector), but Asus and ASRock provide alternatives (additional 3-pin port with ASRock, connection to the chassis headers with Asus).
Start-up
We also took readings for the motherboard start-up times. We measured the time between pressing down the button and the launch of the operating system. We measured two cases, the first at default BIOS settings, the second turning off unused peripherals.
ASRock clearly dominates in this test with by far the fastest boot stage. Asus takes the longest but Gigabyte and MSI aren't a great deal faster. The improvements promised by UEFI don’t seem to have been integrated by all mobo manufacturers!
