M4600 fan noise "issue"

I am not sure if people have already figured this out, but I am assuming those people with the fan on/off noise "issue" are ones with firepro or those with IPS screen not able to have optimus? Coz I do notice the fans are being triggered by the GPU temp passing approx 55C (which is easy and quite often!). Fans would then turn off when GPU temp is down to about 52. While all these happen, CPU temp remains rather constant. Guess there is a reason to spend extra money to get the optimus function after all.. lol

This frequent on/off is really gonna shorten fan's bearing life. but o well... it is actually quite easy to replace them..

any other observations?

 

Since I applied AS5 to both the CPU and GPU, my fans have cycled less frequently, but even before it really was not that much of a bother.

 

Hey Dave, what is AS5? I'm very interested in it if it helps. Thanks.

 

Its a thermal paste called Artic Silver 5, meaning you'll have some major disassembly and repasting to do.

That sure is a solution, but not an very accessible one for a lot of people. A custom fan speed control in the bios would have been more elegant.

 

Another observation regarding to the fan control for the M5950. So there are apparently two level of fan speed control based off gpu's temperature. when temp past 55 the medium fan speed will take place, and beyond 60 a higher (or full speed) will take place. So another "bug" I found is that after heavy gpu load and fan went into full speed mode, the fan will only go down to medium speed and would not turn off upon being further cooler lower than 52C, which is usually the point when fan would be down to 0rev.

Not something annoying sonically nor would it cause damage to the laptop (lower temp sure is good!), but it bugs me a bit how fan control is buggy on dell's high end offering. Or maybe mine is an isolated case.

 

Sure my fans cycle on and off sometimes, but its only noticeable in a dead silent room. Even with wow maxed (I know not the most taxing game) and a few other things going on I only reach 56C on the system in my signature. Heck the internal fans arent even on right now.

 

Ya, I have decided to make peace with it, coz it is otherwise a great laptop.

whatever I described above seems to be a typical behavior of a Dell laptop. Similar stuff is observed from my laptop at work, an XPS. And guess what, people have also been complaining about the on/off "issue" on XPS.

Def. gonna get a cooling platform like you did to make the on/off less frequent.

 

At work Im currently using a nzxt cryo with 3 120mm 90cfm fans at full blast and Ill have to say the internal fans in my m4600 never seem to come on.

 

The tear down manuals are on Dells site, it's not too bad to open up the laptop, keeping track of all the screws is the challange lol.

I have found as a general observation that the stock thermal paste used on 99 % of OEM computers is crap, just that alone was reason enough to open up the laptop and put some decent paste on the CPU / GPU

I have found it usualy makes at least a few degrees C improvement on the temps which is well worth the effort.

 

what is gonna happen to the warranty if you go that far into the components? I personally wouldn't mind doing it at some point as long as it doesn't void my warranty.