Vostro 1500 T7250 to T9500 upgrade, fan running too fast?

Greetings.

I have an ol' trusty Vostro 1500 that I've had since Jan 2008 and it's been running great ever since.

Last week the motherboard decided to give up the ghost (in such a way where it caused the light on the power adapter to go out until unplugging it again) and I so I ordered a new mobo and decided to also take advantage of the situation and upgrade the original T7250 to a T9500 Penryn cpu.

After installing the motherboard along with the new CPU, taking care to remove remants of the old thermal compound from the cpu heat block and applying a healthy fresh dab of artic silver to the new cpu, I put it together and it booted up.

The new CPU seemed a tad sluggish at first until I updated both the BIOS to A06 (1500_A06.EXE) and the chipset drivers (R153997.exe) after which it's running fine.

One thing I've noticed though. The main fan had been running quiet just like before the original motherboard died and what I was used to. Then I decided to convert a video file with Handbrake which took a little over an hour. A few minutes into it the fan RPM increased as it normally would in the old setup.

But after the encoding was finished, the RPM never dropped back down after a little while like it used to, even though the temps (which I later confirmed after installing SpeedFan 4.50) seemed rather low, as this screen shot shows: Image - TinyPic - Free Image Hosting, Photo Sharing & Video Hosting

(Note that the screenshot shows about 4,000 RPM for Fan1 but it was actually staying around 5000 RPM until I ticked the Pwn1 there to below 100% at which point it dipped to around 3900-4000 RPM and stayed there after setting it back to 100%.)

Now granted the fan staying in high gear doesn't seem to be as bad as cases that I've read about of fans refusing to get out of low gear, although I would suspect it could some what shorten the life of the bearings in the fan itself.

I understand that the Penryn CPUs are more efficient CPUs than their Merom brethren, and I'm wondering if this has some how effected the fan speed change points/thresholds, or is there something else that needs to be updated?

Thanks for any advise.

 

I don't think the increased fan activity has anything to do with going from Merom to Penryn... I bet BIOS A06 increases the fan activity to mitigate the Nvidia GPU issue, even though it's not particularly prevalent on the 1500. Unless of course, you have a machine with integrated graphics?

 

I have the Nvidia 8600M GT 256 and never really had an issue with it. Yeah it could get warm under some good gaming and such but the laptop's cooling system always seemed to handle it just fine.