I did everything suggested - fan still runs 24/7

Hey,

I spent the last few hours digging through old threads looking for advice.

My CPU idles at around 55-60°C and the fan runs all the time which is really annoying.

When doing CPU-intense stuff that uses 100% CPU performance it hits the 90°C mark but never exceeds it by more than 1-2°C. Same for gaming.

I'm running Bios A08 because of my card being one of the GF116 revision.
I disabled Turbo Mode.

I also use this power plan:

How To Make Your M14x Quiet! Without Performing Surgery

I put some cardboard under the right and left side of the back of my laptop so there's more room between the laptop and the desktop it stands on (it's raised about an inch/2.5cm).

When having absolutely no programs open I have about 55 processes running and the CPU load is 0 to sometimes 2 or 3% (for less than a second).


The Laptop is about 2 months old and I don't really think there was enough time for a huge amount of dust to gather inside of it. I don't really know when this problem started (read: I don't know if it was there from the beginning) but it started to annoy me about 3-4 weeks ago.


The only thing I didn't do is downclocking the CPU to 2.0gz since I couldn't find a tool for that and I don't think downclocking your CPU should be required for having a silent laptop when doing nothing.
And I mean literally nothing. If I leave it running without any programs open it'd still have the fans running 2 hours later. The only silent moment I get is 3 seconds when the windows logo appears.




Any other suggestions? Should I apply new thermal compound? That would suck since it's relatively new and I don't really want to tear it down.


Any help is deeply appreciated!


Update 05/06/2012:

See my post on page 2.

Got my heatpipe exchanged. Slight improvement. Stock cooling compound was applied really inefficiently, running down the sides of GPU/CPU and on the board.

 

This is one main issue that all gaming high performance laptops have, loud fans, unfortunately it seems the M14x has more than it's fair complaints about this.
Personally I would get a good quality thermal paste and and redo the CPU and GPU, there are no guarantees it will fix your fan issue but it will help keep temps down.

 

im running same bios version and a i7 2670 my fans hardly ever on :S

 

Use a vacuum to clean the fan grill.
It's a desperate move, considering your M14x is 2 months old, but it might work.

 

Maybe new thermal compound can help. i have the same heat issue several months ago. I torn it down and guess what, i found a piece of plastic tape stuck on my cpu die. So i cleaned it and change with liquid metal. It's a lot quieter since then. Problem solved!

 

My M14x is about four months old, and mine idles at about 50C. I would see about cleaning out the fans and getting a thermal repaste.

 

I believe the older BIOS such as A05 don't run the fan as loudly, look around on forums for an older BIOS that doesn't push the fans so hard.

 

There is no older BIOS that reduce the fan speed because what the A05 do is to reduce the fan speed, unless you install an unlocked BIOS where you can reduce the fan speed yourself, but do it at your own risk because reducing fan speed might get your laptop heating up quicker.

 

maybe you call dell and ask them to replace your motherboard
because your fan control isn´t working proper, i had this issue with my old m15x the fans didnt stop running at max all the time.

Or you can ask them to repaste your system because your cpu is overheating all the time, get your own termal-paste and tell the tech to use this one.

 

I will call up Dell first thing tomorrow and ask them what they have to say about the issue. Maybe I'll have some tech guy let me apply the cooling compound.

Anyone knows if I can try older Bios versions other than the A08 with my GF116? I heard there were problems.

Update:

Dell will replace the cooling system. Let's see how that will turn out.

 

Ok so here's a little bump+update:

The technician installed a new heatpipe. I'm idling at ~49-51°C now so its a 4-8°C improvement surfing the web brings it up to 55-60°C.

Don't really know what to think at this point. At least it's silent at some times.
The new heatpipe had cooling pads by the way (the old one as well). There wasn't any compound that had to be manually applied.

 

High-grade thermal paste can reduce temps by up to -10c.

Dell paste in most cases is hard/solid like a rock ...good paste stays gummy.

Should of bought a tube and handed it to the tech once he showed up (asking him nicely to remove the stock and apply the new)

How are your temps when gaming?

 

The pads seemed to have melted on my old heatpipe.
They were smeared all over the place, didn't seem very efficient. But it was some kind of gummy/smeary consitency.

here's a picture of the old heatpipe where you can see what the compound looks like:



You can see that it isn't really applied efficiently. Didn't take a picture of that, but it ran down the sides of the gpu/cpu and a small area around the chips was covered in the molten compound.


I did some benchmarking today and here are the results:

GPU doesn't go hotter than 65°C (72°C before)
CPU doesn't go hotter than 92°C (100+°C before)

So it's an improvement, but still not really satisfying since the fan still runs most of the time when idling.

By the way, the tech guy wouldn't have let me apply my own thermal compund since he was convinced that those dell cooling pads were the best stuff you could get. Well, no comment on that one .

 

I have a thought about your issue, maybe its not your temps but your fan that has an issue.
I used hwinfo to log my cpu temps, gpu temps, and fan speed while doing some normal stuff.
I was getting temps from about 50 at complete idle, up to about 58 while web browsing.
My computer is almost always muted, and i didn't notice the fan at all until I shut the tv off and listened for the fan. The window was open so there was a little noise, birds and such outside. My hearing is pretty average, and i seriously had a hard time hearing the fan with the only other noise coming from the open window.
Hwinfo reported fan speeds from 0 - 3100 rpms.
If your fan doesn't go above 3100 rpms and you still think the fan is too loud maybe the fan has something wrong with it.
Another nice thing about hwinfo is that it lets you set your fan speeds based on cpu temps. You don't want it to let you system overheat but you could set it to only turn on when temps hit over 60 or something.

 

Hwino says that my fan speed varies from 1300-3200 while browsing. I still think it's pretty loud, maybe you're right but I don't have any comparison