E6400 high fan speed at low temperatures

Hi,

Recently bought a E6400 with T9600 and intel GPU. See signature for more details. I'm running windows 7 x64.

My problem is that the fan goes on "high" very quickly in my opinon. It will stay like this until i stop surfing or doing stuff. If i stop it will go down until i start work again.

I wanted to check with others what kind of experience you got with the E6400 and the fan noise. I need to use headphones while working, and using the laptop in the sofa while the wife is watching tv is out of the question!

In this regard I'm very disapointed with this dell compared with simular HP's I had in the past.


Thanks!

 

I feel your pain. When the fan of the E6400 is running full speed -which in my case is often as well - it's just an obnoxious loud sound. Even a small CPU load is enough to have it turn my pc in a blow dryer. Let me tell you it even gets worse when powering two monitors and docked in an E-docking station.

I've undervolted my T9600 to 1V. Now I get temps of about 38 - 45°C when under load. That made a difference in the beginning but i guess that by now I've gotten used to it. I still find the fan behaviour quite strange. I also had Dell replace the fan, heatsink, motherboard... None of this made a (noticeable) difference in my case. The Dell tech told me that this was a normal sound for an E6400 so I've got nothing on them.

But what are your temps? It is argued elsewhere on this forum that E6400 with an intel GPU should run at lower temps. It's of course always possible that there is a problem with the fan/heatsink or so.

 

Right now the fan is running on high and I got the following temps:
ACPI:42 C
CPU: 34/37C
HD: 37 C

I know i had lower and still high fan.. not really sure whats ticks of the high fan speed.. is it a certain temp for a certain time? And goes down when the temp goes lower then X for Y minutes? Anyone got the X and Y for me if that is the case? Running the latest bios A17..

Thanks for your tip regarding undervolting, I will try that.

Support want me to renstall OS which i know is pure BS before they come and look on the computer.. My guess is that its is "supposed" to be this bad.. but I wont lay over and accept that just yet.

Btw now my temp is 41/32/35/36 C and still high speed.

 

The problem lies with a very conservative temperature setting for the northbridge (wherein lies the Intel GPU). Certain graphics tasks, in my case scrolling in Google Earth, can put the fan onto high speed and it is then very reluctant to slow down again.

John

 

Let us know how you get on with them!

 

I will!

I did some undervolting. setting 10x to 0.9875V and few of the others to a bit lower. Seems to do abit of diffrence for a while. But after a while it still goes up.

I think it strange that it needs high fan when cpu tmp average on 31-36 C. That is quite low temperatures i would think.

To bad i cant get I8kfanGUI to work properly with win 7 x64..

 

did you replace the stock thermal paste? made a big difference on my M4400.

 

I will do this. I ordered my AS5 just now. If it doesn't help I think I'll get myself a M4400 as soon as the model is being refreshed.

 

I wonder what replacing the stock thermal paste will do to my next day guarantee.

I was told by the company that dell uses in norway that often unknowledgable people at the dell factories put way too much paste in there, and this screws up the cooling.

 

they dont apply the paste manually in the factory, the bottom of the heatsink is already covered in a layer of paste. Its quite thick and hard. all they do is remove the protective sticker, then screw the heatpipe/heatsink on. the heat from the processor melts the paste and it oozes out, leaving a thinner layer.

but

1) its crappy paste
2) its messy