M1330 fan + temperature

Hello,

This is the best site I've found for dealing with M1330's, so I finally decided to register and post.

The first m1330 I got arrived about a month earlier than estimated. The screen had almost an interlace-like look on it, horizontally, and it was an LED display, but the screen flickered at the lowest brightness level.

The new one arrived, and there's no problem with the screen, but this one seems to have a completely different temperature management system. For good measure, I installed Age of Empires 3 on both of them, and ran it side by side. The fan level seemed to be about the same. However, unless I'm using the i8kfangui program to control fan speeds, the fan itself never turns off. Often times, even when doing simple tasks (eg opening Word), the fan will speed up to a noisy setting. Then, it'll stay there for about 3 seconds, and slow back down. Looking at i8kfangui, the lowest temperature is ~51C, with it spiking to 87C at times, yet it will say 51C one second, 87C the next, then 50C a second after.

My guess is that the temperature gauge is bad, although I'm not positive. For good measure, I ran the Ubuntu livecd on both, side-by-side, ran the program "yes" which uses 99.9% of the cpu. The new replacement immediately fired up the fan on high; the old one kept it on slow, then after a couple minutes went up to medium. It seems the replacement is very abrupt with changing fan speeds, too.

My question is, do I get a second replacement? Upon getting the first replacement, Dell Support said I could have another 21 days to get a new replacement. This laptop runs fine if I use i8kfangui, but obviously I shouldn't have to resort to using a program to mask a build problem with this laptop.

Thanks for reading.

edit: They were both running bios a05 when I tested it. Now the new one is running a06 and still has fan issues.

 

return that crap..if your in a classroom and that happens, you will get stares lol.. mine almost never goes on high, unless its a rally gpu/cpu intensive task

 

call dell up and since you withen 30 days you can return it and get a refund or a new one

 

87C is not normal on an M1330. That's within operating limits, but it shouldn't be that hot. With my M1330, the fan comes on at 51-53C and cools back down to 39-40C. I will say this, I had 2 replacements besides my original M1330 and each one of them behaved differently as far as heat was concerned. My first M1330 that came way back in August ran the coolest of the bunch. Each subsequent M1330 I recieved was WARMER. But, they do tend to cool down after using them a couple weeks. It seems as though something may have changed in the manufacturing process. I don't see a set pattern to fan behavior. It's almost as if the fan is on a timer when it finally spins up.

 

Hm, to what you said FrontierDriver, I haven't contacted Dell about this problem yet. It seems like the laptops running a bit cooler now, so you may be right about them cooling down after a bit of usage.

I ran SuperPI, a CPU-intensive benchmark app, and it seemed like the fan was a lot less abrupt in changing speeds. The laptop will even run without the fan on at times (on power save, but still), at the temps are getting down into the mid 40's. Just enabling Power Save mode gets the temperatures in the low 40's, and the highest it read while running superpi was 89.

Do you think the laptop simply worked its problems out? This would be nice, but it just doesn't seem plausible.

edit: I'd like to add that on the "Balanced" setting, opening up word will turn the fan on medium for a second or two still.

 

Right ... I noticed the same thing with my M1330. ie a few weeks of usage the temperature came under control. Dunno if there is something inside that gets baked in the first few weeks and then start absorbing all the heat..