BIOS A14 for the E6400:

Just make sure it's not the HDD you're not hearing. It looks like a low speed fan. Mine does this.

 

LOL!! You are right man, the damn sound is from HD!! I kept thinking it was system fan. I kept my ear right next to HD, noise is coming from the HD lol. I have the 250G 7200RPM drive.

 

LOL I thought the same at first and discovered it when I was testing why the disk never spin down in vista. I set the spin down delay to 1 minute and voilà! The machine is dead silent when no disk spinning. You must have the seagate like me.

I don't know though if 5400rpm disks are quieter.

 

yepp! Seagate

I started looking at SSDs, YIKES!!! they are insanely priced for 80GB - $350+!

 

You can try putting some electrical tape (the thick rubbery stuff) on the edges of the HDD where it slots into the computer. This will reduce the transfer of HDD noise to the chassis by breaking the metal to metal contact.

5400rpm HDDs tend to be quieter than the 7200s. I can hear the Hitachi 5K500.B spinning when the E6400's fan is not running and there is also a slight ticking noise when it is accessing data. Both these (and the lowest fan speed) are only audible in a quiet room (ie where one can hear the clock ticking).

John

 

Hey guys....

After running with A14 for a little bit (Windows 7, RC1) I seem to be noticing a very odd behaviour.

After running the machine for 15 minutes to 1/2 hour, my machine would get extremely hot, causing the fan to spin up. My machine would ram up in CPU usage (obviously the cause of the heat) and become very unresponsive. If I do a soft boot (reboot through windows), this does not solve the issue as the computer will take a long time to post and start up to the login screen. If I turn the machine off then on, everything goes back to normal for awhile. I had a pretty crazy time narrowing it down to the BIOS, but downgrading to A12 did completely eliminate the issue.

Anyone else see this?

L.

 

I hope not. I just upgraded from A12 to A14 because I thought it might treat a recent issue I've had - the machine was waking up from sleep with the CPU at 1/12 speed (200MHz?).

 

So far so good. No wacky heat or fan issues, and it wakes up from sleep properly - so far.

 

A14 for a few days and no issues so far: 41C or so idle, 50C under 50% load, fan relatively low, no sleep or wake issues.