Dell Lattitude E6530, Fans won't turn off

Hi,
I picked up a Dell Lattitude E6530 /w i7-3740QM in very good condition from a local refurbished reseller. They do their own refurbishing. Performance wise it's great, but the fans run all the time. They are always running at what sounds like a lower speed, but looking at various monitoring tools appears to be about 3100rpm. The fans still ramp up quite a bit more under load.

I am running Windows 10. Literally sitting at 0% CPU usage on the desktop, they're running at the above speed. At idle, temps sit about 55-60C, and approach close to 100C under full load. The air coming out of the vent appears to be about this temp (very hot). I even tried going into bios and dropping the CPU to 2 cores, then 1 core, and the fans STILL run. The only difference is with 1 core i stay under 80C, and the fans never ramp up. Also tried setting the windows cooling policy to "passive", and even limiting maximum processor state in power settings. When I first cold boot, under light use, the fans stay off for about 10 minutes. Once they turn on, they never turn off.

I'm assuming I need to repaste the CPU/GPU. Any other ideas? Are there power profiles I can download from Dell? A Precision M4600 I had previously had a similar issue. Under light use, the fans would repeatedly run for 2-3 seconds, then turn off. After I downloaded the Dell power profiles, and selected "Quiet", the problem was fixed.

 

Is this the iGPU or dGPU version? If it's dGPU are you checking dGPU temps?

 

It is the dGPU version with the Nvidia NVS 5200M. Also has the Intel 4000M as part of the CPU. GPU Temp's don't appear to be too bad. 45-50C at idle. If I force stress test only the GPU in Aida64, It hits about 80-85C, but the CPU also increases to about 80C. Probably because they are on the same cooler.

I used it on battery for the first time today. Eventually, the fan dropped to an even lower speed, then turned off. About 5 minutes after being back on AC power, fans came on and ramped back up to where they were.

Obviously something is wrong, if it's sitting here at 1% cpu usage, and has stepped the CPU down to 900mhz (as it should), while i'm still sitting at 55C. The CPU package is only showing 5 watts usage in this state. Based on how it behaved on battery, it needs to hit 40-45C for the fans to turn off. It never hits that on AC. I ordered some Arctic MX-4. If repasting doesn't work, I will look into undervolting the CPU.

 

Paste won't matter for idle temperatures. You also can't undervolt.

Check the bios for if your system is set to use Optimus or if the dGPU is always on. That is a lot of idle power if it's always on.

 

A

Optimus is enabled. There's only an option for optimus on or off. But the weird thing is in windows 10, the only GPU that shows up in task manager is the Intel. I had a dual core i7 lenovo t540p (returned for this laptop). It basically had the same configuration. Intel 4000 onboard, and Nvidia dedicated. It listed both GPU's in the task manager.

But I have no idea why it's idling so high. I attached a pic of the cooler. Obviously the stock thermal paste had melted away. Basically nothing left on the chip. It was so dry it wiped away completely clean with a paper towel and some dry q-tips. I replaced with Artic MX-4. Was expecting a change but it's honestly about the same. I'm about to just pickup a weaker CPU from eBay and see if that'll run cooler.

The only other thing i can think of is that there were reportedly two different versions of the CPU cooler, which look nearly identical. One for dual core chips, and one for quad chips. They have different heat pipe diameters (2mm difference). I'm wondering if the idiots who refurbished this laptop may have used the incorrect cooler.

EDIT: Definitely not much difference. I never updated before that Aida64 would actually peg the Thermal limit of the CPU after about 3-4 minutes, hitting 105C (package temp), and started throttling hard (10-15%). In the same amount of time, it has now hit 103 and is throttling also, but is doing it much less. Maybe a 1 or 2% throttling peak every 10-15 seconds.

 

If the dGPU driver is not running the dGPU will draw a lot of idle power.

 

The Nvidia drivers are definitely installed. So far the only thing i've found that will keep it at a reasonable temperature is to disable hyperthreading. So, basically, it operates between 1197mhz, and 2.7ghz, rather than the 3.7ghz it can turbo to. I can keep it under 80C in this mode.

The fan still basically runs all the time. but without hyperthreading, it will drop itself down to a slightly slower speed (2778rpm) where it is barely audible. I'm willing to take the performance hit. I may eventually drop a slower cpu in, or possibly try a replacement (used) cpu cooler.

 

One final update. The ONLY thing I could find that worked was disabling Turbo. I still idle at about 60C with the fan staying on low most of the time, but temps never get over about 80C in normal moderate use. 90C or so forcefully during a stress test.

If I use a decent laptop cooler (5 fans), I can get the idle temps down to the mid-upper 40's, and the internal fan will actually turn off once temps stay below about 50C for a few minutes.

I may try picking up a used factory cpu cooler, or replacing the fan.

 

I had a similar problem with my E6520 running 2760QM and Nvidia GPU, turned out it was the wrong heatsink / fan. I'd venture to bet yours is wrong too.