fan2go VS FanControl.Releases

I personally use fan2go, set it up once and forget about it. It has quite the customization, can also assign a header to a temperature sensor (my intake bottom fans are assigned to GPU, the rest to CPU). Take a look here: https://github.com/markusressel/fan2go

How silent are you talking? Silent under load is hard, but quiet under load and silent on idle is possible without a passively cooled build. A good cooler for the processor + slow running case fans + a silent psu (like BitFenix Formula, Corsair RM, ...) + a noise isolating case against coil whine would be the be the foundation for that. I use an old Corsair H90 to cool my i5-5675C, AIO is on the front, my case has one good case fan at the back. Note that the H90 is only quiet when pump speed gets also reduced. With that setup, the noise under load is completely defined by the gpu (a soon to be exchanged RX 570) and the noise of the system on idle vanishes with the ambient noise.

However, the setup I describe above was loud until I got around to control the fan speeds properly. Turned out the MSI BIOS fanspeed control did not work properly. On top of high minimal speed settings (like 50% for the case fan) it ignored my settings and ran the fans higher than I wanted. That made the system rather load on idle. The solution was to control fanspeed with fan2go: https://github.com/markusressel/fan2go (plus radeon-profile controls the speed of the gpu, making it silent on idle as well.)

Fan2go is not only nice to use, it also solves the issue the article's author will run into in the future: Those hwmon paths are not stable anymore. It's possible they will work on his hardware if there is only one (or none, as in the thinkpad example using a different system), but otherwise the script will stop working with new kernels after reboots.

If you want to try a different solution I suggest to give fan2go a try.

You don't really need PID, just a decent fan curve with https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

I think you're looking for FanControl https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases There is a bit of initial setup but nothing crazy, and it guides you through with a nice and clean UI. Once you're in, you can set your fan curve and all the smaller details if you want, like how long will the fans take to spin up or spin down, or how long to delay a speed change after hitting a certain temperature threshold so that its not constantly revving up and down

You could even replace all the fans with Noctua nf a12s and control using this and still have saved money: https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

MSI Afterburner should work for gpu fans. Motherboards typically have their own version of software for fan control, so you could use that (dl from mfg website), or there's this one that I know of that should work for any mobo (although there's probably others): https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

If your fans are heywire, draining your bats download fan control. Works great.https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

I've seen a lot of reccs pointing to https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases if you don't want to stick with your BIOS to control fans.

Being a Corsair PSU, you might be able to control the fan curve with this open source fan software

This app relatively the same feature, but is not open source and run only on Windows